in her hair and the white dress she had worn to the ballet, the only dress in which he had ever seen her, and the two of them were alone. In this picture the two of them were in fact the only people on earth.
“Pretty goddamn romantic.”
As Jack Lovett said to me on the Garuda 727 with the jammed landing gear.
He remembered that her fingernails were blunt and unpolished.
He remembered a scar on her left wrist, and how he had wondered briefly if she had done it deliberately. He thought not.
It had occurred to him that he might never see her again (given his situation, given her situation, given the island and the fact that from her point of view he was a stranger on it) but one Saturday night in February he found her, literally, in the middle of a cane-field; stopped to avoid hitting a stalled Buick on the narrow road between Ewa and Schofield and there she was, Inez Christian, age seventeen, flooding the big Buick engine while her date, a boy in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, crouched in the cane vomiting.
They had been drinking beer, Inez Christian said, at a carnival in Wahiawa. There had been these soldiers, a bottle of rum, an argument over how many plush dogs had been won at the shooting gallery, the MPs had come and now this had happened.
The boy’s name was Bobby Strudler.
Immediately she amended this: Robert Strudler.
The Buick belonged to Robert Strudler’s father, she believed that the correct thing to do was to push the Buick onto a cane road and come out in daylight with a tow.
“The ‘correct thing,’ ” Jack Lovett said. “You’re a regular Miss Manners.”
Inez Christian ignored this. Robert Strudler’s father could arrange the tow.
She herself could arrange the tow.
In daylight.
Her feet were bare and she spoke even more precisely, as if to counter any suggestion that she might herself be drunk, and it was not until later, sitting in the front seat of Jack Lovett’s car on the drive into town, Robert Strudler asleep in the back with his arms around the prize plush dogs, that Inez Christian gave any indication that she remembered him.
“I don’t care about your wife,” she said. She sat very straight and kept her eyes on the highway as she spoke. “So it’s up to you. More or less.”
She smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream. The next time they met she had with her a key to the house on the Nuannu ranch. They had met a number of times before he told her that Carla Lovett had in fact already left him, had slept until noon on the last day of January and then, in an uncharacteristic seizure of hormonal energy, packed her huaraches and her shorty nightgowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis, and when he did tell her she only shrugged.
“It doesn’t change anything,” she said. “In point of fact.”
In point of fact it did not, and it struck Jack Lovett then that what he had first read in Inez Christian as an extreme recklessness could also be construed as an extreme practicality, a temperamental refusal to deal with the merely problematic. The clandestine nature of their meetings was never questioned. The absence of any foreseeable future to these meetings was questioned only once, and that once by him.
“Will you remember doing this,” Jack Lovett said.
“I suppose,” Inez Christian said.
Her refusal to engage in even this most unspecific and pro forma speculation had interested him, even nettled him, and he had found himself persisting: “You’ll go off to college and marry some squash player and forget we ever did any of it.”
She had said nothing.
“You’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. That about it?”
“I suppose we’ll run into each other,” Inez Christian said. “Here or there.”
By September of 1953, when Inez Christian left Honolulu for the first of the four years she had agreed to spend studying art history at Sarah Lawrence, Jack Lovett was in Thailand, setting up what later became the Air Asia operation. By
“Pretty goddamn romantic.”
As Jack Lovett said to me on the Garuda 727 with the jammed landing gear.
He remembered that her fingernails were blunt and unpolished.
He remembered a scar on her left wrist, and how he had wondered briefly if she had done it deliberately. He thought not.
It had occurred to him that he might never see her again (given his situation, given her situation, given the island and the fact that from her point of view he was a stranger on it) but one Saturday night in February he found her, literally, in the middle of a cane-field; stopped to avoid hitting a stalled Buick on the narrow road between Ewa and Schofield and there she was, Inez Christian, age seventeen, flooding the big Buick engine while her date, a boy in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, crouched in the cane vomiting.
They had been drinking beer, Inez Christian said, at a carnival in Wahiawa. There had been these soldiers, a bottle of rum, an argument over how many plush dogs had been won at the shooting gallery, the MPs had come and now this had happened.
The boy’s name was Bobby Strudler.
Immediately she amended this: Robert Strudler.
The Buick belonged to Robert Strudler’s father, she believed that the correct thing to do was to push the Buick onto a cane road and come out in daylight with a tow.
“The ‘correct thing,’ ” Jack Lovett said. “You’re a regular Miss Manners.”
Inez Christian ignored this. Robert Strudler’s father could arrange the tow.
She herself could arrange the tow.
In daylight.
Her feet were bare and she spoke even more precisely, as if to counter any suggestion that she might herself be drunk, and it was not until later, sitting in the front seat of Jack Lovett’s car on the drive into town, Robert Strudler asleep in the back with his arms around the prize plush dogs, that Inez Christian gave any indication that she remembered him.
“I don’t care about your wife,” she said. She sat very straight and kept her eyes on the highway as she spoke. “So it’s up to you. More or less.”
She smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream. The next time they met she had with her a key to the house on the Nuannu ranch. They had met a number of times before he told her that Carla Lovett had in fact already left him, had slept until noon on the last day of January and then, in an uncharacteristic seizure of hormonal energy, packed her huaraches and her shorty nightgowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis, and when he did tell her she only shrugged.
“It doesn’t change anything,” she said. “In point of fact.”
In point of fact it did not, and it struck Jack Lovett then that what he had first read in Inez Christian as an extreme recklessness could also be construed as an extreme practicality, a temperamental refusal to deal with the merely problematic. The clandestine nature of their meetings was never questioned. The absence of any foreseeable future to these meetings was questioned only once, and that once by him.
“Will you remember doing this,” Jack Lovett said.
“I suppose,” Inez Christian said.
Her refusal to engage in even this most unspecific and pro forma speculation had interested him, even nettled him, and he had found himself persisting: “You’ll go off to college and marry some squash player and forget we ever did any of it.”
She had said nothing.
“You’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. That about it?”
“I suppose we’ll run into each other,” Inez Christian said. “Here or there.”
By September of 1953, when Inez Christian left Honolulu for the first of the four years she had agreed to spend studying art history at Sarah Lawrence, Jack Lovett was in Thailand, setting up what later became the Air Asia operation. By
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