A Shore Thing

"I'm leaving," Warden said. "Wasn't that what you wanted?"

"Don't you want me either?"

Now what the hell, he thought. "Sure," he said.

"Hell yes. I thought you wanted me to leave."

"I do," she said, "if you want to. Go ahead. I don't want to force you into anything . . . I don't blame you a bit. Why would you want to stay? . . . There's nowhere in the world I'm needed."

"You're needed," Warden said, coming back and sitting down by her. "In this world beautiful women are needed more than any other thing."

Two chapters from the end, I looked out the window, and there were the Hawaiian Islands, like lush green mountaintops rising from the Pacific. Ten thousand feet above Oahu, I could see Honolulu, first Diamond Head high above the city, then the pastel-colored hotels along Waikiki Beach, and then, as the plane circled to land, Pearl Harbor. Probably like many people coming here for the first time, I imagined Japanese dive bombers swooping in from the north to attack the Pacific Fleet. In the distance was the USS Arizona Memorial on the spot where the sunken battleship had been anchored. But Pearl Harbor stayed in view less than a minute before we touched down and taxied to our gate under a big red "Aloha" sign.

Because Honolulu is a tourist destination and one of the most expensive cities on Earth, the meter is always running, yet you don't get the feeling that everyone's after your money. Even the car rental people, decked out in shorts and sandals, were so mellow they could have been at the beach. And since it was mid-afternoon -- only three hours by the clock after we'd left the East Coast -- that's where I went. Conveniently one just happened to be located right next door to my hotel.

From my room on the 12th floor, Waikiki looked almost deserted. With daylight fading fast, I tossed my bags on the bed and put on a bathing suit. Hawaiian sunsets in late October don't last long, and by the time I got to the water it occurred to me that swimming in the dark might seem a little desperate. Just the same, it felt good to spend a few minutes in the Pacific, even if my pale arms and legs screamed that I'd just arrived from the mainland.

In From Here to Eternity, downtown Honolulu was the place everyone went looking for a good time. The problem was that downtown Honolulu had moved in the half-century since the book came out. Old downtown "is kind of shady," the concierge said. On the other hand, if I wanted to risk it, he said, Chinatown, which was still there, had some great places to eat. How shady could that be? And off I went.

The dive bars and hotels James Jones wrote about had been abandoned long ago; in fact Chinatown looks like Detroit with palm trees. But the food at the Glowing Dragon restaurant was delicious, especially the shark fin soup. "Give you big energy," said the waitress. That I could use. The conference was scheduled to start at 8 a.m. the next day.

The program said "business casual," clearly a term of little or no use in Hawaii, where casual seems to be the everyday rule. Half the men in the audience showed up wearing Hawaiian shirts. "Where's yours?" asked a woman in the front row. Having been here for such a short time, I didn't feel I'd earned the right to wear one, I told her. "Sure you can," she said, "Everybody does." She recommended a nearby store, and I wrote down the address. "We call them 'aloha shirts,'" she said.