12. ALOHA OY! ... (Part II)

                 
                      "Princess Pu-pu-le

                       Got plenty papaya,

                       And she love to give it away,

                       Now all of the neighbors they say
                       Oh me-a, oh my-a
                       You really should try a 
                       little piece of the Princess Pupule's papaya..."

"Sounds like my kind of girl," Em observes.

“Who isn’t?" says Solitaire.  "But I think this one might be a bit old – ”

“I don’t mind older women – you, for example.”

“Old as in dead.  She was a courtesan – a favorite of King Kamehameha.”

“What a lot of romantic rubbish you spout … Are you sure she wasn’t some dime-a-dance doxy in Waikiki?”

“Of course I’m sure.  She was a woman of royal birth –"

"Born Hungarian?"

“They say the King would have married her, but she had a slight mental problem.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know… how do I know?  Because pupule means ‘crazy.’”

“Well there’s no mention of her in Michener.”

“Michener!  That bore!” 

“You should be such a rich bore…”

“He’s not even a writer for christsake, he’s an industry.  You might as well say you didn’t find her mentioned in the General Motors prospectus.”

Friendly Skies 

Timeshares

Postage Stamps

It is 0845 (to be nautically correct) on Monday the 20^th of November and Solitaire, in a photo-finish race against an 0900 luggage pick-up, is stuffing toiletries, as well as Em’s three-bags-full of assorted pills (blood pressure, digestion, gout, muscle relaxant, constipation, diarrhea, anti-biotic, anti-arrhythmia, blood thinner, vitamins, steroidal mouthwash, etc) and his blood-pressure cuff into their carry-ons, or what Lavinia would call their “dressing cases.”  Solitaire has been up since dawn, mainly organizing and repacking Em’s luggage. 

Normally, Em would declare a fatwah on anyone who dared to “manhandle” his suitcase, but his malady has forced him to succumb to his wife’s bullying.  His usual mix-and-match methodology for a two-week journey consists of indiscriminately extracting from his closet a dozen neatly pressed shirts and silk ties, smashing them into the bottom of his valise, then up-ending a dresser-drawer’s worth of Jockey shorts and white Thorlo tube socks on top of them.

To this he adds three sets of sweat suits and two pairs of size 15 AA New Balance running shoes, all menacingly looming like Fafnir astride the dress shirts.  (In an inspired space-saving move, Em has opted to eschew the Captain’s “formal night” and leave his tux at home -- thus making room for more tube socks.) 

  At the pinnacle of the Em Packing Pyramid are a half dozen sturdy volumes containing not less than 900 pages each. (Finnegan’s Wake, Infinite Jest, Kristinlavransdattir, Sellected Works of Mao Tse Tung, etc…)

Book-signing party for 25th volume

Although he is still blowing his nose and intermittently attempting to clear his sinuses, Em is feeling somewhat better now, having consumed a hearty bowl of cream of wheat and a tumbler of buttermilk, two of his favorite comfort foods, and he is lying on the bed watching with detached scientific curiosity as Solitaire reverses his order of packing.   

“You’re going to wrinkle my books,” he says as she heaves them into the bottom of the bag.      

While she packs, Solitaire sings, not because she is happy, God knows, but because she is trying to mask the sound of Em’s increasingly phlegmy coughing.  And also, maybe, to coax a laugh out of him.

          “If you like a ukelele lady,

           Ukelele lady like you,                 

           If you want to linger
            Where it's shady,
            Ukelele Lady linger too.

  Maybe she’ll sigh,

  Maybe she’ll cry,

  Maybe she’ll find somebody else

  By and by…

  

Solitaire swings her hips and mimes strumming a ukelele. 

          To sing to.... where it's cool and shady

          And the tricky wicky wacky grows...

"The what?  Is that like kudzu?"


“If only I had my old uke,” she says, “it would sound better.”

“You can’t do better than perfection,” says Em, rolling his eyes.  “Where do you get these ditties, anyway?  Are you sure that’s an authentic Hawaiian song?”

“Of course it is.  My mother learned it at Punahou.”

...and "Sunny," another
successul alum

Punahou is the old missionary school in Honolulu that Barack Obama famously, as they say, attended  -- 

"Barry"


though not at the same time as her mother, who matriculated in 1925, the same year, coincidentally, that "Ukelele Lady" rocked Oahu's airwaves and crooner Frank Crumit topped the charts with "My Little Bimbo down in the Bamboo Isles." 

  

At 1200, they get their marching orders to board the lorries to the San Pedro Pier. This mobilization appears to activate Em’s respiratory system.  On the drive to Long Beach, he coughs and sneezes, and Solitaire sees their fellow passengers shying away in alarm, as though they're being peppered with a potpourri of ebola spores and typhus bacilli.  And -- who knows? – maybe they are. 

At the pier, which looks like the parking lot at Lourdes, Em commandeers a wheelchair, another occasion for wrathful stares, because Em, although suffering from an incurable cancer, looks considerably less infirm than many of his shipmates.  With Solitaire trotting alongside, he is wheeled at breakneck speed past the lame and the halt by his Filipino pilot, Manley, who, eager to return to pick up his next invalid, steers through the crowd like a Nascar driver. When Em tells Manley, en passant, that Solitaire was born and brought up in the Philippines he gets so excited that he nearly falls into the bay. 

“Ay naku!” he cries, which loosely translates as “Holy cow!” or “No shit!” and there follows a machine gun burst of Tagalog, mostly unintelligible to Solitaire, who every few seconds nods in agreement and murmurs a faintly echoing “Ay naku!”  

In fact, the only other Tagalog phrases she can recall off the top of her head are: “Makakuha ang layo mula sa aking sasakyan, masamang boy!” (“Get away from my car, you wretched boy!”): or, “Masyadong mahal, ikaw magnanakaw!“  (“Too expensive, you unprincipled robber!”), and other useful sentiments learned at her mother’s knee. 

When Manley has deposited them at their new home at Baja Deck #468 and prised a $50 tip from Em’s reluctant fingers, Solitaire trumpets “Mabuhay!” the rallying cry of Aguinaldo’s insurgents in the Philippine-American War, and salutes him with a V-for-Victory sign.

Timidly popping forth and peering about like prairie dogs from their burrows, passengers are spotted and snagged by cruise personnel whose breasts bristle with badges and name plates, and who urge them to hot-foot it along to the luncheon buffet if they wish to eat because a compulsory lifeboat drill will be held two hours hence at exactly 1500 hours. 

As everyone knows, “cruising” should rightly be called “guzzling.”  Em, for instance, believes that having paid up front for unlimited victuals, he is honor-bound to live up to his self-administered pledge to eat and drink everything in sight.  The Princess Line, however, is determined to protect him against his own greed.  In their concern about the recent pandemic of "legionaires' disease," they have done what any responsible parent would do, which is to be sure their children's hands are clean before allowing them to wreak caloric havoc amidst the burgers, fries, pizzas, salad bars, toppings, tubs of fat and corn syrup.  So, for instance, in the Horizon Court, a cavernous cafeteria located in the ship's bow, two blonde replicants, armed with rubber gloves, spray bottles and Cerberus-like vigilance, collar them and pinning them with surprising strength, spray them with sheep dip.  Having lived four years in Iceland, Solitaire knows
sheep dip when she smells it.

The buffet turns out to be stocked with enough cold cuts and pasta salads to sustain every seagull in the Pacific.   The sight of so much food disgusts Solitaire and takes away her appetite.  Not so Em.  Gazing mesmerized at an infinitely expanding galaxy of puddings,  Em gives the palm to the butterscotch-praline banana-split, proclaims it the best ice cream in the world, and proceeds to eat three bowls to prove it.  

Returning to Baja 468, they pass the shipboard spa where Em slams on the brakes, buys a roundtrip pass for the sauna and steam room, and books two appointments for nightly after-dinner massages.   The spa hostess, a lissome tropic flower, gives Em the once-over and a charming giggle and he smiles back demurely.  She then tells him that his teeth are too brown.  He ought, she says, to have them whitened, for a mere $500, with some sort of light treatment.  Em, whose sales resistance is as low as his immune system, succumbs instantly.

All Solitaire can think about – and she holds the image before her like the grail – is five days of non-stop reading at sea, curled up with Tom Stoppard or William Boyd or some other Brit-wit in a cozy nook in the library or bundled into a windy deck chair, looking up from her book now and then to watch a blue-footed booby wolfing fettucini on the wing.

In Solitaire’s dreamy Pacific vision, blissful bouts of Arcadia and The Blue Afternoon are pleasantly superimposed upon steaming mugs of tea or bouillon, classes of gentle yoga, leisurely breakfasts on the lanai, occasional strolls round the promenade deck, rounded off by hot showers, cold aperitifs, small yet sumptuous suppers and stimulating conversations, coma-inducing massages from Xandria, the tiny Filipina ecdysiast (ret.) with hands like a snake-charmer; slow-dances on the fantail beneath a silvery moon; and so forth and so on to an inevitable delirious conclusion in Baja Deck 468, which is so baja that they can hear the lapping of waves against the hull and the throbbing Whitmanesque Song of the Engine Room…

      And so to bed … as Pepys would say – and, in fact, did say.

But nothing is what it seems and Solitaire’s fanciful vision, as we can surmise, is no more than a pipe dream. 

                 

                  Merrily,
                       merrily,
                             merrily,
                                  merrily….

                          
                            Life is but a dream…….