Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  After “Moon River,” Rusty and Gail cha-chaed to “La Bamba” and shagged to “Runaround Sue.” Sweating and out of breath, they fell into each other’s arms for “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Gail pressed her breasts against Rusty’s chest. He pulled her close with his hand in the small of her back, and she could feel his erection.

  Praise the Lord, she thought. From a man who can’t get it up to a man who can’t keep it down, and all in one night!

  “You’re too modest, Rusty,” she whispered in his ear. “You dance wonderfully.”

  * * *

  —

  Harry watched the gorgeous blond woman he’d spotted that morning at the singles meeting. He had hoped to ask her to dance tonight, but she appeared fully engaged with a rangy redheaded golf pro who had also attended the meeting. The rule was that he couldn’t dance twice in a row with the same woman. He was supposed to entertain all the single women on board without showing favoritism.

  This was an easy assignment for him, since he had been a priest. He knew how to sublimate lust. He had been doing it successfully for years when Sister Estelle appeared before his altar rail in her black-and-white habit. Kneeling, she accepted the host from him with lowered eyes. Day after day she returned. One morning she raised smoldering green eyes to meet his. His fingers trembled as he placed the host on her outstretched tongue.

  Eventually both endured the scandal of leaving the Church to marry each other. He had been terrified, since he knew no other way to earn a living. But even then, before all the revelations about predator priests, he had felt contempt for his colleagues who violated their vows of celibacy yet continued to ride the Church gravy train—such as the priest in his Maryland hometown who fathered a child with his housekeeper and then turned the child over to her sister to raise. Or the priest in the neighboring town who employed a “houseboy” who was actually his lover. He had first encountered this form of hypocrisy in seminary when some of his fellow students had justified playing musical beds with one another by defining celibacy to mean the avoidance of a long-term relationship that might detract from one’s commitment to God and to one’s parishioners. Under this definition a succession of one-night stands was okay.

  But he and Estelle had bitten the bullet and forfeited their status, their vocations, and their livelihoods for each other, unwilling to conceal or deny their love. He opened an insurance agency, and they took up ballroom dancing with an avidity available only to those who have been prohibited from dancing for much of their lives. They won a number of competitions all over the United States. But after twenty idyllic years, Estelle developed breast cancer and died. Since he had retired from his insurance agency to take care of her, he was dreadfully lonely afterward. So he signed up as a gentleman host on the Amphitrite for companionship. With his dance experience, he met their most important requirement. Now he cruised much of the year, sharing a cabin with another host and spending his days and evenings entertaining single women with bridge, Trivial Pursuit, and spirited mealtime banter.

  Many made passes at him, but he abided by his agreement with the cruise line not to get involved with any one particular woman on board. Should he do so, he would be asked to leave the ship, and this comfortable, convivial life he had created for himself would end. But sometimes when he got back home between cruises, women from the ship stopped by his Maryland condo to quench desires that had been provoked by all that shipboard restraint.

  Chapter 3

  Reverse Cowgirl

  “This is your captain speaking. It’s a lovely afternoon here on the Arabian Sea. The waters are calm, with just the slightest swell, and a gentle breeze from the northwest is keeping the temperature balmy on deck. I think you would be hard-pressed not to agree with me that it’s a glorious season to be seaborne—and a marvelous day simply to be alive!”

  As she ate spinach ravioli in the officers’ dining room, Jessie smiled at Captain Kilgore’s British accent, combined with his un-British rhapsodies about the weather. His daily noontime commentaries usually sounded like bad bucolic poetry. At age forty-six, he had recently married for the first time—a younger French woman who sold Hermès scarves in a boutique on board. She was always decked out in her wares, and she ran workshops to teach women passengers four dozen ways to tie their scarves, like sailors learning their knots. The captain appeared here and there around the ship all day long, sporting a goofy grin. He was so besotted with his new wife that it was a wonder he could steer the ship in a straight line.

  Loud laughter erupted from a table in the corner, at which huddled four bridge officers in white uniforms and a young East Indian woman who worked behind the purser’s desk. Clearly the men were vying for her favors. The male to female ratio among the staff, officers, and crew was about five to one, so the women on board were wielding unaccustomed power. Since each officer had his own cabin, they were prime targets. Even if they had wives back home, many of the men had no scruples about also having what were called “ship mistresses.” The women themselves enjoyed the spacious cabins and the gifts from the duty-free boutiques—and hopefully the illicit lovemaking, as well.

  The ship itself was organized like the British Empire. On the top decks were the suites that housed aristocrats, film stars, politicians, and wealthy businessmen. On the decks below were the commoners who had saved for years to afford their passage. And below sea level, crammed four into each windowless cabin, were the people who did all the work, most from the Philippines, though the cruise literature stated that the crew represented some sixty-five countries.

  Returning to her cabin, Jessie watched out her window as the skyline of Dubai gradually appeared on the horizon. She was listening to Otis Redding sing “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” through earbuds attached to her iPhone. Kat had also loved this song. Jessie had listened to it several times a day ever since her death. It certainly summed up Jessie’s current predicament.

  The clinic was currently closed because half the passengers were disembarking in Dubai to fly home, and the other half were going on shore excursions. Captain Kilgore had already emphasized over the loudspeaker that many new passengers from northern climes would no doubt be bringing viruses on board—instead of acknowledging that his ship had already become a hothouse for norovirus. The Amphitrite should probably have been flying a black flag, like the plague ships in the fourteenth century.

  Dubai was wedged between the desert and the ocean. A mist of salt spray and fine sand shrouded it in a tremulous haze. As the ship slowly approached the port, dozens of giant skyscrapers seemed to rise right up out of the sea like a shimmering mirage. The tallest building in the world pierced this haze like a spear. Alongside it sat lower buildings, one built to resemble the wind-swollen sail of a dhow.

  Using its side thrusters, the ship sidled up to the quay. Seamen appeared fore and aft to attach long rope cables the thickness of Jessie’s forearm to the cleats. Then they placed round collars of tin around the ropes to prevent rats from scurrying up them into the holds. If someone had only thought to put collars around mooring ropes in the fourteenth century, mused Jessie, rats with fleas that carried the plague couldn’t have spread it. There would have been no Black Death. For want of a few thousand tin disks, 25 million people had died.

  Jessie retrieved from her desk the handout from the purser about which body parts needed to be concealed in Dubai—as though the sight of her swollen ankles in her white nurse’s oxfords might drive the local men into a frenzy of lust. It seemed that shoulders and knees were forbidden in Dubai, so no shorts or tank tops. Apparently the head and hair could remain uncovered. Also, the sheet warned, no public displays of affection, and especially not homosexual ones, which could result in imprisonment or deportation. Living for so many years in Vermont, where homosexuals were regarded as normal everyday taxpaying citizens, had shielded Jessie from the reality almost everywhere else. But this cruise was serving to remind he
r that she and her friends might yet be herded into boxcars or machine-gunned into mass graves.

  This condemnation of homosexuality in Dubai seemed especially hypocritical coming from people who had owned slaves until 1963. A blogger on the Internet that morning had claimed that the elite here paid their former slaves to attend their parties because it was a status symbol to display how many you had once owned. The blogger also claimed that on the desert outskirts of this city stood concrete barracks with no air-conditioning that housed 300,000 men from India and Bangladesh, lured here with the promise of high wages for construction jobs. When these wages didn’t materialize, they were unable to return home because their passports had been confiscated by their employers. Apparently most of the amazing structures composing the Dubai skyline had been built by such captive labor.

  But Jessie reminded herself that if she insisted on itemizing the crimes of every port at which the ship docked, she would just make herself miserable. Kat had trained her to notice the broader political implications of her experiences. But their children, Anthony and Cady, Martin and Malcolm, hypnotized by tiny electronic screens that merely reflected them back to themselves smaller than life, had no such difficulties. And if she wanted to rejoin the carefree, she would probably do better to concentrate on the theme of life as a Mardi Gras in this Las Vegas of the Persian Gulf.

  Jessie pulled on cargo pants and a long-sleeved khaki shirt with many tabs and flaps and zippers, plus a wide-brimmed hat with a chin strap. Her face would be her only flesh on display for the ravaging males of Dubai. Looking into her mirror, she was disappointed to discover that she resembled Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark more than Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen. She noted with dismay a new splotch of sun damage that had just appeared on her right cheek, joining several others. The only good thing about her increasing number of facial wrinkles was that they concealed some of the dark spots. Apparently all those childhood summers on the glaring waters of Lake Champlain were now staking their claim.

  She boarded a shuttle bus in the bustling port, which was stacked high with multicolored metal shipping containers, like a child’s Lego project. In the city, she toured a museum in an old adobe fort with exhibits that concerned the founding of the town by fishermen and smugglers. Antique photos showed robed and veiled women carrying huge pottery water jars on their heads in the spot where the tallest building in the world now loomed. You had to admire whatever forces had conspired to allow the women of Dubai to abandon their giant water jugs for indoor plumbing, and to trade their burkas for Versace and Armani.

  Jessie rode a converted fishing boat across a creek to the gold souk, where she wandered along the main corridor, surrounded by tourists inflamed with lust for the gold gewgaws that filled the display windows and flowed out the shop doors as though from Ali Baba’s caves. She spotted Ben Armstrong, wearing khakis and a black polo shirt. He had a cleft in his chin, as well as dimples in his cheeks when he smiled. Before their affair, she had fantasized about caressing those facial craters with her tongue. The reality had been disappointing. His thick stubble had chafed her tongue, lips, and cheeks like coarse sandpaper. That was the trouble with trying to enact your fantasies. Either they turned out to be boring, or the gymnastics required to achieve them proved impossible to perform without dislocating a limb. She recalled her first and last threesome, in Vermont during commune days, which had concluded with sheepish apologies all around. She had long since discovered that it was more arousing to leave the imaginary within your imagination.

  Ben’s problem was that he was too good-looking. Women had always pursued him, so he had never learned how to be agreeable. He now had four disgruntled ex-wives and six estranged children to support, without a clue as to why the wives had all left him. He had taken the Amphitrite gig because it paid hardship wages and there was almost nothing to squander them on—if you stayed away from the ship’s casino and from Dubai’s gold souk. You also had no expenses for rent, food, clothing, utilities, health care, or liability insurance. In addition, staff were forbidden to fraternize with “guests,” as the cruise line insisted their employees refer to passengers. So even if Ben yearned for wife number five, he wasn’t likely to corral her without getting thrown off the ship.

  “So how’s it going, Jessie?” Ben sauntered toward her. He held up both hands, palms out, to indicate that he knew a welcoming hug between them might get them both deported. “Did you ever imagine there was this much gold in the entire solar system?”

  “It’s pretty amazing, all right.”

  “Are you going to buy something?”

  “God no!”

  Ben laughed. “You’re probably the only woman I know who would say that.”

  “I’m trying to get rid of stuff, not acquire more.”

  “I could buy you a memento of our cruise—a bauble for your charm bracelet?”

  “Save it for your alimony payments.”

  “That’s what I’ve always loved about you, Jessie. No muss, no fuss, no bother. How come we never got married?”

  “It might have something to do with the fact that I’m a lesbian.”

  “You’re no lesbian—if my memory serves me correctly. You must be at least bisexual?”

  Jessie smiled. “I’m not anything anymore—just a grieving widow. The children nowadays have invented all these labels—tranny, cis, shemale, boi, bisexual, pansexual, polyamorous, queer, top, bottom, nonbinary. As far as I’m concerned, they should do and be whatever they please. But they need to get over themselves and realize that Syrian refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean.”

  “Yikes!” said Ben. “Somebody’s grumpy today.”

  “Well, it’s just that all that gender-identity stuff isn’t really very important because everyone’s body—whatever its gender or nongender—still collapses and decays in the end.”

  “Hmmm. So you’re sad, and I’m sad, too. How about a little mutual comfort in the night?”

  “Not gonna happen,” Jessie assured him. The thing about having grown up in Vermont in the seventies, in that golden age after the invention of the Pill and before the arrival of HIV, was that you had already tried everything, so you lacked the curiosity that might propel you into disastrous new explorations. “And you know perfectly well that if you had me again, Ben, you’d soon grow tired of me, just as you have of all the others. That would make me furious. I might take a scalpel to you, and then have to spend my final years in prison, being raped by scary women. So it’s better if we just stay friends.”

  Ben laughed. “Yow! I see your point!”

  “But you’re very sweet to pretend that you want me. Especially since I feel about as desirable right now as a corpse on an autopsy slab.”

  Ben grimaced.

  “I suggest you get yourself a massage at the spa instead,” said Jessie. “There are some lovely women there with very strong hands.”

  “I already tried that. My masseuse wanted to marry a rich doctor and move to the States. By the time she got through with me, I almost agreed. But I need a fifth wife almost as much as I need a pet skunk.”

  * * *

  —

  Ben watched Jessie stride down the corridor of the souk toward the ship, looking like a petite Dr. Livingston in her safari gear. She was small but very wiry, as he recalled from their trysts at Roosevelt Hospital. Her biceps had been at least as firm as his, and she had been able to pin him with ease. Not that he had ever opposed her being on top.

  She had captured his attention the first time he ever saw her—in pale blue scrubs with coal black hair in a pixie cut, her eyes as blue as the sea on a sunny autumn morning. Now her hair had gone silver, and her face bore the wrinkles and discolorations appropriate to her age. But her eyes were just as vivid as before—and as remote. Even when she had been his lover, he had never felt as though he had any hold over her. She possessed a detachment that h
e had found alluring at first, evoking his love of a challenge, but in the end it had proved impossible to breach.

  Ben had met her parents when they came to visit her at Roosevelt. Her mother, as diminutive as Jessie, was movie-star beautiful. Her amber eyes were as cruel as those of Queen Grimhilde in Snow White. Her father was a urologist, world-famous for his nerve-sparing innovations in surgery for prostate cancer. He was also a war hero who walked with a cane because of his injuries. As they toured the corridors of the hospital, several of the older doctors and nurses recognized him and behaved as though they were experiencing an Elvis sighting.

  Dr. and Mrs. Drake were staying at the Erie Hotel on West Fifty-sixth Street, where they had rendezvoused after his ship home from the war in Europe had docked in New York City. At that time he had qualified for a discount because he had worked as a surgeon for the Erie Railroad right after medical school. By the time they visited Jessie, though, the Erie had been converted into a welfare hotel. But Dr. and Mrs. Drake had been enchanted by the cheap room rate. Dr. Drake had invited Ben and Jessie to lunch, and had then treated them to a hot dog from a street cart. Mrs. Drake said almost nothing the entire time, eyeing Ben with cool dislike, having evidently figured out that he and her daughter had been sharing bodily fluids outside of wedlock.

  Ben was alarmed to feel a twinge of attraction to Jessie again. He had offered her the clinic job because he had thought she was safe. They had had their moment in the sun and had quickly fallen back to Earth all those years ago. But at this point he would probably be turned on by anyone with two X chromosomes.

  However, he wasn’t usually interested in women his own age. That had always been his curse. He had pursued each of his wives because she was a lubricious young vixen. But once married, each had insisted on having a child. When a wife became a mommy, her sex appeal flew out the window for him. A woman could hide her lack of desire for a man, and even feign enthusiasm. But a man’s lack of passion was right there on display. He pursued affairs during his marriages because the danger and novelty restored the erections he lost once he became Daddy. Sometimes the excitement of a new affair could even flog a response out of him when he was back in bed with Mommy.