darling and honey

He hasn’t seen her for nine months, and it takes him over an hour to get through customs.  She arrived on a local flight half an hour earlier and is waiting in a chair by the entrance to Cairns International Airport.

It takes Darling three airplanes, thirty-six hours, and sixteen hundred dollars to get there, but he’s there, and she sees him walk out of the corridor.  Darling drops his passport and his backpack and his luggage and runs to her, lifting her off the ground for a few dozen seconds.

Of course they kiss. 

Four days later, Honey is crying and Darling looks irritated. “She is bleeding,” she says, referring to herself in the third person because she doesn’t know any better.  Honey explains yet again about her operation to have a blood clot removed from her uterus only a week before and how the doctor told her not to have sex or swim or do anything to shatter the stasis of her land down under.

“[You probably wish I’d never gone to the doctor, don’t you?]” she asks him.

Darling rolls his eyes.  It’s obvious he’d rather her be healthy than anything else, and she’s spent the last four hours lecturing him over a bottle of wine and maybe a dozen cigarettes across the picnic table in the game room at yet another youth hostel.

Now they’re in bed and Darling’s got his arms behind his head, giving the ceiling a thoughtful glance.  Honey gets ready to say something else, but Darling just sighs as he gets up to leave. “Konakereba yokatta,” he says as he walks out of the double room.

He comes back five minutes later, after a piss and a smoke.  She’s crying.  “[You must hate me.  You came all this way to see me and I’ve done nothing but say terrible things to you.  I hate me.  I feel so awful.]”

And it’s exactly what he’s thinking, but he can’t say that.  He has to tell her of course not, it’s not her fault, he was acting like a jerk and should have been more understanding.  It’s not her fault he hasn’t had sex in nine months and won’t get to for another year.  It’s circumstance, it’s fate, and there’s no arguing with fate.

Honey cries herself to sleep as Darling contemplates his options.  I don’t need this aggravation, he thinks to himself.  As soon as I get on that plane to go home, it’s fucking over.

Darling’s next cigarette finds him at the Cairns Zoo, inspecting a turkey sandwich for some hidden intrinsic property to justify the eight dollars and fifty cents that it cost.  But it didn’t come in gold foil and there’s no caviar tucked inside.  Honey is drinking a bottle of water and smoking one of the cigarettes she rolled the night before.  Darling was shocked to discover she could roll cigarettes, and even more shocked when he realized he could no longer do it.

They walk past a decrepit kangaroo whose fur has either turned white with age or is some kind of albino kangaroo.  He’s too old to live with the other kangaroos and has been sent to live with the peacocks and the pelican.

They walk past a sulfur-crested cockatoo that curses at them, calling Darling a bugger and informing Honey that her cunt smells like rotten sushi.

Comic shock lines of happiness can be seen around Honey as they enter the building with the koalas.  A pale blonde girl with eyes a diluted shade of blue is informing a group of onlookers that myths about koalas eating eucalyptus and getting stoned are unfounded and that koalas’ metabolism and diet is the cause of their slow and slothful nature.

Honey doesn’t understand or care and is a few yards away, staring at a koala clinging to a branch maybe three feet in front of her face.  Darling’s never seen her so happy as she is right now, this look of pure delight while watching this koala with his ass thrust out in front, shitting tiny pellets that look like whoppers at the rate of one every forty seconds.

Diluted-eyes girl goes on and on about how koalas will attack with their sharp claws if they feel threatened, and explains that they have two thumbs, but Honey is still absorbed in the glorious spectacle of koala defecation.

Her thrilled expression doesn’t change, and the koala makes no other movement (besides bowel movements) for over five minutes.  Darling is more impressed by her interest in the scene than the scene itself.  The koala caretaker girl and the others have long since dissipated, and finally the spell is broken and the happy couple goes to see the crocodiles.

As they walk past the albino kangaroo, the Japanese girl sneezes.  “Bless you,” the boy says. 

“Sank you dah-reeng,” she says.

“You’re welcome, honey,” is his sarcastic reply.

Darling lights another cigarette, only to find himself in that repetitive dream where Honey is sitting across from him at the game room picnic table, drinking wine and lecturing him.  It’s not a dream, and this time the lecture is about how he hasn’t grown up at all since the last time they met.

“[All the stress of this trip is mine,]” she says, “[I’ve looked up all the prices for rooms and picked all the things we decided to do, and you haven’t done anything.]”

“I picked the New South Wales Art Museum,” he corrects her.

“[Wow.  One thing.  You picked one thing.  We Japanese spend all year working hard, so when it’s time for vacation we like to do everything we can to use our time in the most effective way possible.  I want you to make the decisions.  I want you to hurry up and become an adult, someone I can depend on.]”

Darling ponders suicide, mulls over the most effective way to use the tools at his disposal to inflict death upon himself and he pictures the confusion this little Japanese girl will experience when she has to deal with shipping his body home and explaining to the police what happened.  Five extra points for me if I can make it look like she did it, he thinks to himself.

“[Remember when I asked you what you’d do if I got pregnant?  You said ‘I don’t know.’  That’s not very adult-like.  What do we do if we have a child and it gets sick?  I don’t want to ask you and have you say ‘Oh, I don’t know.’  I want you to say, ‘It’s okay, Honey, let’s start calling hospitals.’]”

Darling is pissed that his Japanese has come this far.  He thinks it would be much better if he could feign ignorance at everything she’s saying.  But the sad truth is that he understands every bitter word of it.  So he lights his twenty-second cigarette in two hours, making a pyramid of butts in the ashtray in front if him.

“[You’ve never even lived on your own.  Your grandma does everything for you, she cooks for you and does your laundry.  You don’t even pay rent.  What would you do if she died tomorrow?]” Honey asks him.

“I dunno,” Darling admits, “but I’m sure I’d get by somehow.”

“[Yeah!  Exactly!  You don’t know.  Do you know anything?!  I can’t have kids with you, because I’d have to take care of them and you, and if you can’t help me take care of the kids what do I need you for?]”

Konakereba yokatta, he thinks to himself yet again.

The cab picks them up at exactly 5:15 and they’re at the Cairns International for the second time.  The lady behind the airline counter laughs at Darling’s passport picture.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says.

And then she flags down one of her co-workers and shows her his passport and now they’re both laughing at it.  Darling would be amused if this were the first time this has ever happened…this week.

Three hours later they’re in Sydney, in the back of an airport shuttle van jumping the bumps in the road.  The driver is telling everyone about cricket and pointing out the train stations they pass.

Darling and Honey’s next hostel smells like soap and plaster and poison.  The scent is thick and constant, and doesn’t even subside when they get to their room.  The whole building is just as it was in the 40’s and looks like the set of some bad gangster movie,  except gangsters would never tolerate broken windows and would probably be able to afford central heating if it were available.

There’s a dirty shower, but no dirty bathroom.  The dirty bathrooms are down the hall and the dirty blankets don’t match and might be from someone’s closet.  Darling is disappointed, but Honey is delighted that there is a kitchen and loves the plastic picnic tables on the roof overlooking the Sydney skyline.

They spend that whole first day walking around downtown Sydney, searching in vain for a restaurant without the word ‘café’ in its title.  After three hours and several hundred failures they resign themselves to fast food and continue the epic search for this black skirt Honey saw in Cairns the week before but didn’t buy and it sold out the next day and now they are going into every store selling beach-type clothing to attempt to find another one.  But it doesn’t happen today.

They give up the quest for the skirt and start thinking about dinner.  They stop at a 5-story supermarket on their way back to the smelly hostel and agree on steak, but not the good steak because it costs too much.  Honey spends 15 minutes trying to decide which rice will go with the meat, but Darling grabs some rolls and tells her bread will be a better complement.

After the supermarket they stop at the liquor store and Darling finds himself walking back with a bottle of cheap Merlot in his hand and no bag to put it in.  He grabs the plastic shopping bag from Honey’s purse and puts it in there, the pads clearly visible next to the wine.

“[Aren’t you embarrassed carrying around pads?]” she asks him.

“Nah, someday I might actually have to buy them for you, so this is nothing.”

The sun is gone and so is every trace of warmth, and the ocean wind is cold and impersonal.  They pause at an intersection and Darling is amazed to see it raining tiny clusters of soap bubbles, even if it’s only for a minute.

He gives her the key to let her unlock the front door to the hostel, but she struggles with it and someone inside takes notice and lets them in.  They climb the two sets of stairs that were such a problem two days before, with Honey’s cumbersome luggage and no elevator. 

Darling thinks about the differences between the two of them, as demonstrated by their luggage and the different ways they fill it.  He brought a backpack and a small suitcase, she brought a purse and a giant, thick-plastic hardcase.

I fold my clothes and toss them in there, he thinks, but she folds them far more carefully and then puts them in plastic bags and then sits on the bags to force the excess air out.  It seems Americans treat their luggage like they’re a chest of drawers, but the Japanese seem to wrap and pack everything with care, like sending a present to oneself.  A present containing one’s most prized and necessary possessions.

Honey shoos Darling out of the communal kitchen and he finds himself setting the table and smoking a cigarette while waiting.  He tries to take a picture of the lit-up skyline, but it comes out blurry in the viewfinder because it’s too dark.  He tries twice more without success.

She brings out the meat and they both take pictures to celebrate their first self-made meal in a week and a half.  They say “Itadakimasu!” and Darling opens the wine.  It’s red wine, so there’s no explosion.

Halfway through their meal, Honey takes a smoke break and cuts some cheese to put on a cracker.  She breathes out some smoke and says what’s been on her mind for the last hour.

“[When we were in that store, you never once offered to carry the basket, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, he hasn’t grown up at all, has he?’  But when we were outside and you carried those pads down the street without acting embarrassed, I thought, ‘Wow, he really is becoming an adult.]”

Darling has his steak knife in his left hand and eyes the veins in his right wrist.  Down the stream, not across the river, he thinks to himself.  He curses himself again for being able to understand everything she’s saying but not having the speaking skills to defend himself in these exchanges.

Their flight leaves in the morning, so Darling skips down to the front desk to call for a shuttle to the airport at 5:15am.  He turns in the key and gets his 20 dollar deposit back and for the rest of the night they have to keep the door propped open with a shoe.

When he walks by their room he finds Honey skimming through a tall stack of travel brochures and leaves for the safety of the roof.  He finds a group of Korean guys and a white kid with a French accent drinking box wine and smoking.  And they offer him a seat at their table.

They also offer him a hit of their joint, but he declines.

After guitar and much more wine and many more cigarettes, Darling is crouched in front of the dirty toilet in the dirty bathroom where only the night before he was shitting liquid piss out of his ass.  The night before he was shivering in his sweatshirt with his pants around his ankles praying for the pain in his stomach to subside, but now he’s fully clothed and reeling from the taste of his stomach acid. 

Honey is standing behind him, running her fingers through his hair and telling him everything is going to be okay.

Darling takes a frozen shower and feels slightly better, and by 2am he can fall asleep, having dreams about angry Japanese obaachans and endless hours as a kaisyain in the middle of conversations where he doesn’t know what’s going on but he is definitely the butt of a joke.

He wakes up a few hours later and leaves his sandal in the door.  He’s pissing when he looks at his watch and notices that it’s 5:30.

Five thirty!  The shuttle was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago!  Shit, he thinks as he darts down the stairs to the lobby.

Darling finds a very pissed-off-looking Indian man pacing around the hallway and apologizes and tells him to give them two minutes and they will be down.  He rushes back upstairs and shakes Honey until she wakes up and realizes the urgency of their situation.

They toss everything into their bags and have the room cleaned out but messy in less than three minutes.  Darling is falling down the stairs trying to get Honey’s enormous luggage to the first floor and the driver rushes them to the van.  A European girl is asleep in the back and the rest of the stops are made at high speeds amid cursing in Indian.

When they make it to the airport, Darling gives the driver a 20-dollar tip for waiting and thanks him profusely.

And it’s another plane ride where they don’t talk much.  Honey listens to awful pop music on her CD player and Darling is occupied with his portable video games.

Another shuttle takes them to a motel and Darling is psyched to find that they’ve got their own bathroom.  Honey is ecstatic that there’s a TV so she can watch Big Brother and Sex in the City. 

They go back to the mall to see if another skirt has magically appeared in the clothing store and it hasn’t.  On their walk home Honey says that eating out is too expensive and that she will eat ramen while Darling goes to dinner by himself.  He gets an idea and tells her to wait in the room for him, that he will be right back.

The motel doesn’t have a kitchen, but it does have a flat-top grill.  Darling keeps this in mind as he does his shopping.  He buys plates, forks, knives, and spices.  He buys two fat, expensive steaks.  He buys cheddar cheese and crunchy crackers.  He even buys a bottle of white wine, knowing she doesn’t like red, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t go with steak and cheese as well as red.  He drops over 50 bucks on dinner.

“I am…surprise.  I am very very surprise,” she says when she sees what he’s returned with.  But she does seem happy, and Darling does too.

After some more cooking and some wine, they start talking and smoking and relaxing, when Darling makes his fatal mistake.

“It seems like lots of Japanese people want to learn English,” he says.

“No,” she corrects him, “they don’t.”

“But they do seem to have an interest in American culture, don’t you think?”

“No,” she corrects him again, “they don’t.”

“But they watch lots of American movies and wear American-style clothes and listen to American music.  You don’t think that’s culture?”

“[No!  That’s just music.  Just listening to music doesn’t mean you want to learn culture.  Lots of people like the music but don’t like the culture.  Why do you keep arguing with me about Japanese people?  You don’t KNOW.  I’m JAPANESE.  I don’t make declarative statements about Americans, do I?  Won’t you just admit when you’re wrong?]”

“De mo-,”

“[You just can’t do it, can you?  You’re so stubborn!  You won’t admit when you’re wrong.  I can’t be with someone like that.  If all Americans are like you, I don’t want to go to America.]”

And Darling leaves to go buy more cigarettes, even though they’re 10 bucks a pack and he doesn’t even want to smoke anymore.

Later they try apologizing to each other, but neither is into it.  The cloud of their argument hangs over the last few days of their vacation, the last few days before he goes back to his homeland and she flies back to the Gold Coast for the last three months her visa will let her stay in Australia.

Now they’re at the airport, sitting in a row of chairs just before airport security and the point of no return.  Honey looks really sad and Darling checks his watch every few minutes to be sure he will make his flight to Auckland, then to Los Angeles, then his hometown.

“[It’s okay if you don’t go,]” she says.

“I don’t want to go, but I have to,” is Darling’s reply, but he’s not even sure if he means it.  He’s thinking about the year it will be until the next time they could see each other and wondering if it’s worth waiting for or if now is the perfect time to cut his losses.

It turns 10:00 on the big clock underneath the monitors hanging from the ceiling and they stand up for their last kiss.  Neither one cries, even as the elevator doors close on Honey and Darling steps into the queue to have his backpack searched and his soul x-rayed.

(c) 2005 jordan baugher