The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux

The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241964217
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-05-17T07:00:00+00:00


“William Blake. That kind of thing?”

“I believe that, too.”

“I speak French,” Anne said. “In France I was taken to be a French person. That’s how good my French was. I’ve got a good ear, I guess.”

Jim from San Clemente said, “I have trouble with English!”

This was the truth. He said fillum for film, for example. He said nucular for nuclear.

“What sort of nuclear astrophysics do you do?” I asked Steve. “Stephen Hawking generalizations about the nature of the universe? And by the way, did you hear that Hawking’s wife has just left him? Amazing. The guy’s a genius, slowly wasting away in a wheelchair, and she ups and leaves.”

“Are you married?” Anne said.

“No. I upped and left,” I said. “Kind of.”

“Hawking is interested in the big questions,” Steve said. “I deal with particles. Nuclei. But they contain what human life contains – helium, oxygen –”

“He told me that on our first date,” Anne said.

I said, “You do research?”

“Yes.” And he frowned. His hat was slightly crooked, his shirt hung out. “Mainly the nucleosynthesizing of tantalum-one-eighty.”

I may have seemed a little slow – at least I had no immediate response to this.

“It’s the rarest of the stable isotopes,” he said.

“Of course.”

“We were trying to find out how it was made.” He smiled a scientist’s smile. “We found out how it wasn’t made.”

“Tantalum-one-eighty?” I said.

“Yup.”

Jim said, “Looks like rain, Dick.”

After we reached the island, Atata, which was about eight miles offshore, we went snorkeling. We had lunch. It rained. We looked in the gift shop. Postcards, T-shirts: Tonga – Paradise in the Pacific.

“Steve, do you have a necktie I can borrow?” I asked on the way back. “I have to meet the King.”

“And you need a suit to see the King,” Afu said, the night before my audience. Nor was she much impressed with Steve Kellog’s dark Mormon-style tie. She said Salesi had better ones.

“I don’t have a suit.”

The virtue of traveling in the Pacific is that a suit and tie is never necessary. True, a tie is required in some restaurants but you can always be assured that the food in those places (always served by candlelight) is pretentious, saucey, over-priced, and strictly for honeymooners.

“But you have a lounge jacket.”

“I don’t have any jacket,” I said. It was often ninety in the shade here.

“You try Salesi’s jacket,” Afu said.

Salesi was a short stout man. I am not a short stout man. The shiny ill-fitting jacket made me look like a bum. That odd jacket with the neatly knotted tie made me looked like a mentally defective bum.

I tried on the tie and jacket for Afu’s inspection. She was dissatisfied but resigned. I was staring at my reflection in a mirror.

“It is the best we can do,” she said.

“I look like a Mormon,” I said.

They had invited me to their house – “farm” was the word they would have used – for dinner. They had said dinner, but I did not see any food. We spent an hour or more drinking Kool-Aid and going through their son’s wedding pictures, all seven albums.



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