by Lisa Alther
Once they were gone, she took a leave of absence from the ER to clean out and sell her childhood home on a hill overlooking the Burlington harbor. She attended endless meetings with lawyers and accountants and wrote checks to the IRS, the state of Vermont, and her brothers. Although the youngest sibling, she was the only one still living in Vermont, so she had been tasked with the thankless jobs of final caregiver and executor for her parents.
Her mother left a mountain of shoe boxes crammed with every piece of paper any member of her family had ever touched since the middle of the nineteenth century. Jessie posted the photos and genealogical charts on Ancestry.com and organized the letters by author and date. She had no idea why she was doing this, since the younger generations of her family weren’t remotely interested, but she wasn’t going to be the one to jettison these relics. Her children could throw them all away once she died, because they wouldn’t feel any guilt.
Jessie’s father had left several dozen black plastic garbage bags crammed with junk mail. She had had to sort through it all because here and there among sweepstakes mailings and charity solicitations a stock certificate or insurance policy would surface. She had even found two loose diamonds of unknown origin. She had also found bottles of expired painkillers stashed all around his office and bedroom. Dilaudid seemed to have been his favorite.
As for Kat’s detritus, her drafts, manuscripts, reviews, and publicity materials filled two dozen plastic bins at one end of their garage. Jessie assumed they should go to a university library somewhere, but she hadn’t dealt with that yet. She was interested only in those journals. She had brought the final one with her on this voyage, determined to understand how such apparent mayhem could yield a finished book with a coherent plot and recognizable characters. She also needed to know what Kat had been thinking as she faced her own death.
Once the dust clouds from her loved ones’ deaths had settled, Jessie had faced the decision of what to do with herself next. She was eligible for Social Security, and she had an adequate 401(k). But her father had worked until he was seventy. He had said he knew it was time to retire when laparoscopic surgery came in and he had lacked the interest to retrain. But she dreaded all the free time retirement would allow. She had always avoided distressing topics like the meaning of life by being too busy to think about them. That had been Kat’s department. In earlier eras, useless old women had been burned as witches. If you couldn’t produce babies, no longer titillated men sexually, possessed money and property others coveted, you had to go. That body in the lake, floating right up to her deck, had been merely the last straw in an entire bale of despair.
But then Jessie had received an e-mail from Ben Armstrong, who had been a resident with her at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. They had had a brief, uninspired affair and had occasionally run into each other at conferences since. Ben was in charge of the clinic on a British cruise ship called the Amphitrite. His second-in-command had had to cancel at the last moment because of illness. From college courses, she knew that Amphitrite was Poseidon’s wife, Queen of the Seas. A ship named for such a powerful goddess had seemed a positive omen. So Jessie had embraced this chance to sail through Southeast Asia and the Middle East on her and had boarded a flight to Hong Kong a few days later. She was now serving her patients on board as well as she could, but then they would disembark and go back home to their own physicians. A new set of potential patients would board, and she would never have to see the previous ones again, much less help them die.
The shadow side of such transience, though, was isolation. Ben, the four nurses, and the lab tech, as well as the rest of the staff and crew, were friendly but distant. Quarters were close, and contracts for permanent staff were long. It was important to guard your privacy. Late at night in the belly of the ship, the crew seemed to do a lot of partying that involved drugs, cheap beer, and recreational sex. But Jessie wasn’t included, nor did she want to be. Her own salad days were long gone. Cell phones didn’t work at sea, and Wi-Fi was expensive and sporadic. For the first time in her life, she was completely on her own in this tiny hermit’s cell, afloat on a vast wasteland of salty water.
She opened the drawer of her bedside table and took out some photos of Kat and her parents. She had selected ones taken during the days when all three had been healthy and happy. The challenge before her was to replace the images in her brain of them suffering and dying in hospital beds with these images of them smiling in the sunlight. But was it possible to banish your grief without also destroying your memories of past pleasures? If you amputated a portion of your heart, wouldn’t the whole organ cease to function?
One photo featured Kat with her arm around Jessie, who was half a foot shorter than she. But both had silver hair, summer tans, and high cheekbones. And both were dressed in jeans and colorful cotton shirts. It was no wonder strangers had often asked them if they were sisters. At least part of their mutual attraction must have involved narcissism.
Not for the first time she pondered the fact that both Kat and her mother had had amber eyes, tinted with the hues of an autumnal forest. She used to tease them that werewolves had amber irises, which turned blue when they killed someone. A recent article in one of her medical journals reported that a high percentage of heterosexuals picked partners with eye colors identical to those of their opposite-sex parents. Many lesbians, in contrast, picked partners with eyes the same color as their mothers’. Just in case anyone still believed in free will.
Returning the photos to her drawer, Jessie switched off her light, rolled over, and wrapped her arms around her pillow, pretending it was Kat. But this comfort was short-lived because it immediately summoned a flashback to Kat’s last days, when she had been in such pain.
No longer able to swallow, Kat was being fed through a tube that went directly into her stomach. She was stoic about her own death. Her lawyer father in North Carolina, an Atticus Finch look-alike, had worked for Legal Aid in Atlanta as a young man. He had joined the Freedom Riders and had been brained with a lead pipe in Montgomery. His ancestors were Dutch and German farmers who had fought for the Union army during the Civil War. He insisted that he was also part Cherokee. He maintained that many “white” southern families had some African ancestry. But they tried to explain away the darker complexions of various family members by claiming to have had a Cherokee princess for a great-grandmother. He told his children that their ancestors did include Africans, but also a Cherokee woman who had escaped the Trail of Tears by marrying one of the Dutch farmers. As a child, Kat had been entranced by this Cherokee woman and had read everything she could find about her tribe. She had learned that Cherokees taught their children not to cry by holding their nostrils shut, since silence was essential when hiding from enemies. Experimenting, Kat had discovered that it was impossible both to cry and to breathe through your mouth at the same time.
Billions of people had died before her, Kat had pointed out. Billions more would die after her. Everyone died eventually. The only variables were time, place, and cause. One afternoon she asked Jessie to get her feeding tube removed and to give her the maximum doses of morphine so she could starve and dehydrate in repose. Jessie dutifully carried out these wishes.
Kat’s last words to her had been “Don’t mourn for me too long, Jess. Find someone new and be happy again.” Then she pinched her nostrils shut and rolled over, turning her back to Jessie. Friends and family came and went, but she appeared to be in a coma. After a few days she just stopped breathing.
But where is Kat now? Jessie asked herself as she clutched her pillow to her chest. Surely such a forceful personality couldn’t just evaporate into thin air? She had asked Kat to send her a sign. No sign had yet arrived. Jessie hadn’t been formally religious since she was obliged by her mother to attend the Congregational church in Burlington as a child, but a passage from the Bible kept scrolling through her brain: “For now we see through a glass darkly: but then face
to face.” Will I ever again see Kat face-to-face? she wondered as the ship rolled slowly back and forth on its giant belly. Not likely. But anyone currently alive who pretended to know the answer to this question was lying.
* * *
—
Rusty Kincaid ducked through a narrow doorway off the walking deck. Before him rose eight extra ship propellers, each eight feet high and eight feet wide. They were made of textured stainless steel that glistened in the moonlight. Shaped like sharks’ fins with rounded points, they were called “the Commodore’s Cuff Links.” They could have passed for abstract sculptures. The wall beyond them was low enough to climb over, and far below lay the open sea. At that moment the water was being whipped by the wind into racing white horse tails, illuminated by light falling from the dining room windows. He couldn’t say yet when he would jump, but late one night before this cruise ended, so would his life.
He tried to imagine that final plunge. Would his body take over and struggle to surface, or would it agree just to sink down into the inky depths? Would sharks arrive to rip him apart, or would he continue to sink until he rested on the ocean floor with the barnacled hulls of sunken ships and the grinning skulls of drowned sailors?
His mother and sisters had taken up a collection to send him on this cruise. Their hope was that he would meet a nice woman who would help him recover from Irene. He first met Irene when she signed up for golf lessons with him at the Cincinnati country club. What he noticed right away were the crow’s-feet around her eyes when she removed her sunglasses and the deep laugh lines etched into either side of her mouth. “A mature face,” his mother and sisters had called it. But a sensual face was what he saw. Her golf lessons had lengthened to include drinks in the bar afterward. Then drinks and dinner. Then drinks, dinner, and the bed in his apartment above the pro shop. He had never been so in love. But after five months she went back to her boring hedge-fund husband. Rusty had tried to drown his heartbreak in pot and alcohol. He had been in and out of rehab twice and had taken several brands of antidepressants. He had lost his job.
Once on the ship, Rusty had obediently attended the singles gatherings in the piano lounge before lunchtime. Plenty of eager women had flocked around him. But none was Irene. He had done therapy, so he understood his plight: He was the youngest of six children. His parents and all his siblings had doted on him. He was his mother’s favorite. He had been a golf champion at an early age and was said to be good-looking, to boot. Women had thrown themselves at him, but he had rarely responded because most wanted a breadwinner. Whereas what he wanted was a woman who would coddle him as his mother and older sisters had done. Irene, the mother of four, had held out the promise of being that woman. But then she had ditched him, saying that her own needy children were more than enough for her.
The walking deck had become an obsession with Rusty. He spent his days circling the ship like a dog trying to locate a place to lie down, searching for the best spot from which to jump. If he jumped from the balcony of his cabin, he would land in a lifeboat. If he jumped from the bow, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet had spooned on the Titanic, the officers on the bridge would spot him and initiate maneuvers to avoid sucking him into the propellers. They would turn the ship around to retrieve him. He needed to find a place where no one would see him, not even the CCTV cameras. He had to make sure he wasn’t rescued and resuscitated and returned to the torment that had plagued him every minute of every day since Irene had abandoned him. The low wall by the Commodore’s Cuff Links held the promise of being that perfect spot.
Rusty returned to the walking deck. As he passed other chatting passengers, the phrase kept running through his head in time to his footsteps, “I want to be dead. I want to be dead.” The truth was, he didn’t really want to be dead. He just wanted this relentless pain to stop. But he had tried everything else. Apparently the only way to end the pain was to end his life. Making this decision had already helped him feel better. One day soon this long heartbreak would cease.
But he still felt an obligation to his mother and sisters at least to try to enjoy this cruise they had financed, until he just couldn’t bear it anymore, so he entered the ship at the doorway that led to the ballroom, where the Arabian Nights Gala was now in full swing.
* * *
—
Attired in her embroidered green galabiya, with a long silk scarf thrown around her neck and over one shoulder, Gail stood at the edge of the dance floor in the ship’s ballroom while the orchestra onstage played “Fly Me to the Moon.” A woman with tousled auburn hair was singing jauntily into the microphone in an impressive alto voice.
Gail scanned the dancers for Harry, a gentleman host she had met at the singles meeting that morning in the piano lounge. Most men there had been “hosts,” who received free passage in return for dancing and playing Scrabble with the many single women on board. They wore small rectangular pins that identified them as gigolos of the high seas. Harry was the most presentable of those hosts, in a well-cut Italian suit. His hair was quite thin on top, but balding was said to be a symptom of excess testosterone, and what woman could object to that? Gail was determined to discover whether Harry’s services extended beyond Scrabble.
Gail spotted Harry, now disguised as a Bedouin sheikh in a white robe and a red-checked kaffiyeh. He was dancing with a woman from the singles meeting who wore filmy pink harem pants and a face veil. Gail felt a stab of indignation. Had Harry already paired off without even auditioning her? But as far as she was concerned, couples were created to be split up. A triangle was her favorite geometric shape. She adored it when both halves of a previously devoted couple could be beguiled into preferring her to each other.
Meanwhile, Gail spotted another man from the singles meeting who wasn’t a host. He was tall and lanky, with curly ginger hair. No corny costume, thank God, just a nice seersucker suit and what appeared to be a Ralph Lauren Black Label tie. He was sitting alone at a small round table, looking as downcast as a rock star whose band has just quit. The challenge of cheering him up appealed to her. He seemed quite young, but she realized she would rather baby-sit him than nurse Charles.
Poor Charles had nothing to recommend him anymore. She had heard the saga of Okinawa so many times that she could have recited it while in a coma. He kept pointing out that he belonged to the Greatest Generation. Finally she asked him why, if he was so great, he couldn’t get it up? She had lived for years in a state of arousal that sent her on the prowl whenever she had the chance. It was such a sad contrast to their courtship, when she had been in charge of his young children and he had had to waylay her during naps and after bedtime—once his wife had passed out from too many vodka tonics. He had enjoyed this regimen of deceit and had shown no intention of getting a divorce. So she had finally been forced to leave one of his love notes to her on the kitchen counter.
She sauntered up to the gloomy young man’s table. “May I join you?”
He gave her a wan smile and stood up to pull out a chair. Then he sat back down and gazed at her without enthusiasm.
“I’m Gail.”
“Rusty.” He extended his hand, and they shook.
Gail noted that it was a tanned hand with a firm grip. Flexible fingers were always a plus in a man.
“Would you like a drink?” he asked.
“A scotch would be nice, thanks.”
He looked all around, spotted a waiter, and waved him over.
“Didn’t I see you at the singles meeting this morning?” asked Gail.
He nodded.
“Where are you from?”
“Cincinnati.”
“Are you having fun on our cruise?”
He nodded, though his mournful spaniel eyes contradicted him.
“Do you dance?”
He shook his head.
This was going to require some heavy lifting, reflected Gail. But sometimes t
he shy ones could be the most passionate. Their feelings were so pent-up that, once released, they could turn into a raging torrent of lust. Rusty might relax once he understood that she didn’t want marriage or money from him, just some uncomplicated sex.
“My husband is sick in bed with norovirus,” she announced, to put him at ease.
He looked alarmed instead.
“Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. I’ve already had it and have recovered.”
The waiter placed their drinks on their little table.
“What do you do in Cincinnati?”
“I used to be a golf pro.”
“Really? I love golf. Maybe you could give me some pointers?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
The orchestra started playing “Moon River.”
“I adore this song,” said Gail, sighing. “Are you sure you won’t dance with me?”
He hesitated for a long moment. “I guess I could try.”
They stood up and walked out on the dance floor. Their bodies fit together well. Gail was imagining what a handsome couple they must appear to Harry, the faithless escort, who was waltzing nearby with a different member of his harem, without even a glance in Gail’s direction.