lapels.
“I’ll leave the window open. If he wakes up and starts to cry, you can bet we’ll hear it.” She hoisted him against the shoulder of her form-fitting little black dress and walked toward the stairs. Harry smiled goofily as she passed.
Robert was the only one who’d opted for a white dinner jacket. He had a green carnation in his lapel-a nod, I was sure, to Oscar Wilde. It was nice to see a gay symbol other than the color pink or the rainbow triangle. I asked him what he was saying about the broken panel in the front window. “I don’t want anybody to know,” he whispered. “I’m just telling people that one of the caterers accidentally knocked into the window.”
He pulled me aside. “There is a problem, though,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard a rumor that we might get some protesters tonight.”
“Really? How’d you hear that?”
“I have a friend who works at Homeless Solutions,” he said.
I knew it; it offered temporary and transitional housing services. It was a place that might have helped Hiroshi Mura, had he been willing to leave the shack in Makiki.
“He told me that somebody was going around today, recruiting for a demonstration tonight. They were paying twenty bucks just to show up here and be part of a crowd.”
I shook my head. “What’s up with that? Who cares enough about us to go to so much trouble?”
“The same people who broke the window? Or the ones who threw the shit on the sidewalk?”
Just then, Cathy and Sandra came down from the office above, and Robert and I stopped talking. Poor Cathy looked like she could have been Arleen’s homely sister-she was even smaller than Arleen, and her shapeless linen dress looked like an elegant flour sack. She was only half-Japanese, and the contrast between Arleen’s delicate beauty and Cathy’s pallor was dramatic. Sandra wore a navy business suit and sensible pumps, and it looked like both she and Cathy had sworn out a no-makeup pact for the evening.
The four of us walked out to the lanai together. It was surprisingly large, paved with flat stones, with several big kukui trees shading it. A large frangipani tree with its exotic purple blossoms bloomed directly in the center, above a bar set up on folding tables. The waiters and waitresses all wore plumeria leis and aloha shirts, and they were offering a choice of mai tais or champagne cocktails. I noticed several of the women guests were wearing long, formal muumuus, called holokus, in colorful patterns.
Sandra came over and steered me and Gunter toward a short, chubby man in an immaculate tuxedo, with a lavender cummerbund and matching bow tie. “I want you to meet one of our biggest benefactors, Charlie Stahl.”
“I knew I should have gone on a diet before coming to this party,” he said. Everybody laughed, and Sandra introduced us. “So, detective,” he said to me, holding my hand for just a little too long to be comfortable. “You’re even more handsome in person than you are on television.”
Gunter snaked his hand around my waist and said, “Yes, I always tell him that. Especially when he’s… out of uniform.”
Charlie Stahl gave him an appraising glance, said, “I’ll bet,” and went on to meet some other guests.
Gunter and I were momentarily alone. “If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were jealous, Gunter.”
“You don’t want to get mixed up with that old leather queen.”
“He’s also the heir to a huge pineapple fortune.” While Dole made sure that every pineapple off their plantation came with a red and yellow sticker on the side, the Stahl pineapples were primarily canned under store names, pressed into juice and used in flavorings. But that didn’t make them any less successful than Dole.
“Well, who would you rather be with?” Gunter struck a pose, one hand on his hip, the other behind his ear. “The heir to a huge fortune, or moi?”
I pretended to look around behind him. “Did you see which way he went?”
My parents arrived a few minutes later with Lui and Liliha, followed almost immediately by Haoa and Tatiana. All three women wore modern versions of the holoku, floor-length formal dresses in floral patterns. My father and brothers were handsome in their tuxes, though I could tell Haoa would have rather worn an aloha shirt and flip-flops no matter the occasion. For a few minutes I forgot about the unsolved murders on my desk, about the rumors Robert had heard and the vandalism earlier in the day.
This is what my life could be, I thought. Surrounded by family and friends, a handsome man on my arm. Maybe all the torment that had accompanied my coming out of the closet was over, and I was ready to move on with my life. It had been six months, after all. I’d dated a couple of guys casually, had some good sex and some bad sex, and gotten more comfortable being recognized.
Right after I returned to the force, I spent a month undercover on the North Shore, working on a big case, and that chance to get away had been good for me. I met some gay friends, I surfed, I caught a killer. Then I returned to Honolulu and started my new life as an openly gay man.
I introduced Gunter to my family, and we all made small talk for a few minutes. Then, expertly, Lui cut my father from the crowd and led him away, with a nod to me and Haoa to follow.
“Well, isn’t this nice,” my father said. “All my boys together.”
“So what’s up with you, Dad?” Haoa asked. “You won’t go to the doctor?”
Lui groaned at Haoa’s lack of tact. “I thought you were going to let me handle this.”
“Handle what?” Dad asked.
“Mom says you don’t feel well and you won’t see Dr. Yu.”
“I feel fine.”
“No you don’t,” I said. “We can all see it. Your stomach hurts, you’re tired.”
“Why are you being stubborn?” Haoa asked.
“Why are you doing this?” Dad asked. “It takes three of you big boys to gang up on one old man like me?”
“We love you, Dad,” Lui said. His eyes flashed at the both of us. “We want you to be well, to live a long time to spoil your grandchildren. You remember you and Mom used to drag us to the doctor every time one of us sniffled? Well, it’s the same thing. We just want you to take care of yourself.”
“I’m fine.” He squared his shoulders and stepped away from Lui. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if your mother would like a drink.”
PREACHING TO THE CHOIR
A man I recognized as Vic Ramos stepped up to the microphone at the front of the room and cleared his throat. “Hi, my name is Vic, and I’m HIV positive.”
The audience was silent. “I guess we don’t have many veterans of twelve-step programs here,” he continued. “You’re supposed to all say, ‘Hi, Vic.’”
There were scattered calls of “Hi, Vic” from around the room. Gunter’s voice was among them.
“Well, that’s a little better,” Vic said. He unbuttoned the jacket of his tuxedo. “You see, I know about twelve-step programs, because I’m also an alcoholic. I’ve used intravenous drugs. Oh, and I’m also a homosexual, and I’m in love with a guy in the audience named Jerry and I want to marry him.”
He smiled at us. “Guess that gives me a lot to talk about, doesn’t it?” The audience laughed a little. “But I’m not going to get into most of that. Let me just tell you that when I was a teenager, growing up in a little town about an hour outside Manila, I started to realize that I was sexually attracted to other guys.”
He started to walk around. “Can you hear me without the microphone? Good. I’m a salesman, you know, and salesmen love to walk around while they make their pitches. Now, I don’t know about where all of you grew up, and what it was like there, but I can tell you in a small town in the Philippines in the 1960s, we didn’t have gay porn. We didn’t have magazines like The Advocate or TV shows like Will and Grace to tell us that it was all right to feel the way we did.” He stopped under the multicolored arc of balloons. “No rainbow coalition, gay pride, pink triangles or tea dances.”
He put one hand in front of his stomach and the other up in the air and did a little Latin dance step. In his tuxedo and black patent leather loafers, he could have been a contestant on any of those TV dance shows. Somebody in the audience called out, “Ole!”
