Before he died, Bill Evans called Tony Bennett and said: “Just go with truth and beauty above all else”. I have always sought truth as a principal value: who I am, who we are, what is the meaning of this world. Since age 12, I followed the ancient dictum on examining life. I sought truth, but it was beauty that betrayed me. Three years ago I confused a largely platonic Hawaiian summer infatuation with love. Was it just an extension of the grief of few months’ fresh separation from my husband or more? After many crossings, I know it is a story of how we get attached to motifs of landscape and want to hang onto people that were once there. In other words, it is a story of how I understood myself through Hawaii and what I could learn here that I could not learn elsewhere. Of how I only could learn the hardest truth here, where I felt safe. This man loved Elvis like I do, and in the brief span of knowing him on the island, there was as much cruelty as tenderness and I had a very hard time letting go of the fantasy of continuation. The island knew how to seduce me but also how to give me freedom from my childhood of pain. Moreover, the story of my attachment to that man is a representation of survival of my father, because it was finally with him next to me in Temple Emanu-El on the Pali Highway that the visceral grief poured out of me.
Not long after my arrival in America at age 15, my humorous, multilingual, handsome, and intelligent father showed his dark side. Last night before being taken in police custody he pinned me to the wall and choked me. At the court hearing I did not attend, he gave a message to my social worker: “Tell her I don’t have a daughter anymore”. He never tried to contact me while I was in foster care and neither did I. I destroyed all of his pictures, trying to obliterate him from my life. I persisted in anger for over 10 years. Finally, in consequence of my Jewish spiritual journey I decided to try to find him and make amends. I was three years too late. He died in New York City at the age of 47 in 2006, of a heart attack. While already living in Hawaii, I visited the small Staten Island cemetery with my then husband, my father’s likeness engraved in eternal smile on the gravestone shocked me, the inscription in Russian by his second wife decoded by me thanks to an intro class taken years prior. It spoke of a beloved husband, never to be forgotten. The day was gloomy and it was raining. I was saying the prayer just a couple of hours after stepping off Hawaiian Airlines flight from Honolulu and the contrast in my consciousness could not be greater. I went from breath to suffocation as I tried to say I forgive you and goodbye. Nine months from that moment I was separated and infatuated with a man who was still mourning the recent death of his father and whose blue eyes and black hair reminded me of mine.
The first weekend we spent together, he played his father’s favorite operatic moment and cried. He continued on the piano as I sat on a swing under a majestic mango tree in the translucent light of late Kailua morning. His father, a beloved Chula Vista high school music teacher, died six months prior and his wife of three weeks left him shortly after his death, for reasons I will never find out but I do know that both of our marriages began on Pearl Harbor day--his on a Marine Core base beach and mine on a liberal college campus. The music of his grief captivated me, the music of Awakea street and the beautiful garden. The expansiveness of the foliage, the mango tree commanding court, the fruit of its loin scattered everywhere, everything was sinking into me as the sounds of his fingers were touching the keys of despair. The notes reverberated in melancholy and the beauty of it all was too much to behold. I thought the music was reaching out to me but no, it was just a moment of solitude witnessed. We then held hands on a miniature bench under the mango tree, ripe mangoes all around us, on the verge of rotting like us metaphorically and our fathers literally.
His presence was the promise of a new beginning that never came. All of the moments we spent together were deeply embedded in the imagery of red earth of the island and its mountain peaks that he traversed on his own, climbing dangerously to victory. Moments, seemingly banal but beautiful that betrayed the truth. The first night’s strong embrace, strong and powerful, I sunk into it and the words “You need someone to take care of you” would come to haunt me, because that moment never happened again and the sensation of security was not repeated, just like with my father on the first night in America. On a different warm summer Hawaiian night, he made ketchup smiley faces around hot pockets as the lights in the garden flickered. He bought me a voluminous, vintage denim hibiscus skirt from Liberty House--the old time Hawaiian “Macy’s” style department store. I gave him three long stemmed red gingers and hand engraved blue glass bottles with a turtle, a dolphin and a seahorse. The gingers were opening in sadness. At the conclusion of summer, we sat on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and drinking red wine, speaking of Poland, the us under the tree crown at summer’s onset, mirrors of the music playing, and he remarked--we are reminiscing and it has not happened yet. He asked me if it was the Polish connection for me--his Polish grandfather escaped the Nazis to have an illustrious Navy career, I answered "no," lying. I did not wanted to be Polish, having converted to Judaism and still plagued by so much guilt. At the time I still did not know how to bridge the two. His first wife was Jewish and he said to me, as I hurt, that I might be "too Jewish" for him. I could not understand. That day, the last day we saw each other in Hawaii, I burned the scroll of poems I had written since meeting him under my Plumeria tree as he held the swing staring into oblivion of Olomana in the distance. On that day, there was another flashback to my father as a deep hole remained in my door. Love me tender, love me cruel. Then I could not understand that was not a good recipe.
I wanted to make amends with my dead and violent father through that man so I followed him to San Diego, at the time justifying it as a grand romantic gesture. The first San Diego dawn was terrifying. I realized I am chasing ghosts of yesteryear, I vomited in tremors. Through the dark cord of the sailor’s music, I came to the site of my first shipping off by my father, shortly after arrival in America, to spend Thanksgiving among strangers while he stayed in Northern California. I would never see the object of my Hawaiian infatuation in San Diego and upon returning to Hawaii many months later, I finally let go of the pain as the words from beyond spoke to me about opening the deepest recesses of my heart, where he resides (where my father resides too) to the world and to love again. In the silence of those alive or dead, they can be anyone, even those that continue to hurt us. In searching for them and never finding a voice of happiness, they can be dark utopian kings we imagine them to be and we thus never show up for our own life. It is thus always up to us to let go of fantasy and remain in the only moment we ever have, the present. He was the vessel that finally brought me to peace with my father, and in leaving San Diego and my father behind, and once again laying on the shore of my beloved and safe island, I was able to realize, albeit with a nine months gestation delay, that I can find and get what I want. LOVE and beauty and truth. That I am and always have been capable of making myself happy.