Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  Luckily, he hadn’t been caught by the time he met Melva. She convinced him to start a business installing and maintaining security systems, an easy transition, since he was already an expert on them. By the time he handed the business over to his son, he was widely known as the premier security provider in Yorkshire.

  Now he and Melva traveled the world on the Amphitrite. The cruise they were currently taking cost more than their first house. He spent the days in port tanning on a lounge chair at the ship’s swimming pool, while Melva went on bus tours. Melva came home at teatime most days, annoyed that the Germans on the tours didn’t know how to queue properly. But what Serp loved best were the days at sea, when the gentle rolling of the boat and the Tim McGraw songs on his iPhone lulled him to sleep there in the sun by the sloshing pool. He also loved the daily line-dancing classes in the ballroom, to which he wore his cowboy boots and hat. Hooking his thumbs through his belt loops, he sashayed up and down the gleaming floor in unison with several dozen others, mostly women. The worst thing about his injury was that he wouldn’t be able to wear his boots for a while.

  Back in his room, he took some pain pills and rang for Pedro to bring an ice pack.

  “Oh no, what have you done to your foot, Mr. Serp?” Pedro arranged a frozen gel pack wrapped in a towel around Serp’s bandaged ankle.

  “Fell down some steps. Clumsy me, eh?”

  “So sorry, Mr. Serp.”

  “Just Serp is fine, Pedro.”

  “So sorry, Serp. What else can I get you?”

  “Nothing else, thanks. I just need to rest.”

  As Pedro exited, Serp thought about how much he loved being waited on. He had always waited on others—in his business, but also at home, since Melva worked long hours as a secretary at a propane-delivery firm. His parents had also worked day and night in their off-license shop while he was growing up. Yet here was their son, being waited on like a king. That had been the best thing about the British Empire: the inexpensive servants. Here on the Amphitrite you could pretend that the empire still existed (though this fantasy now cost you dearly).

  Once the ice pack had been on his ankle for ten minutes, he was freezing and decided to lie in the sun at the pool and get future ice packs from the deck boys. He changed into his black Speedo by hopping around the room on his good foot. Pulling on his white terry-cloth robe, he swung out the door on his crutches.

  * * *

  —

  In the laundry room on the tenth floor, Gail Savage spread out on the ironing board one of Charles’s dampened shirts. When they had courted, he had been a dashing older man. Twenty years later, he was just an older man. She despised his stoop when he walked, the slow and deliberate way he flossed his yellowed teeth, the milky film that had clouded his once-burning brown eyes. Why wouldn’t he pay to have his damn shirts washed at the laundry? He whined that people other than she used too much starch or folded them incorrectly. He made it clear that since he was paying for this voyage, just as he had paid for everything else in their life together, she could damn well wash and iron his shirts. She slammed the iron down on his navy blue Lacoste shirt and shoved it back and forth, deliberately ironing in some wrinkles. Maybe if she did a terrible job, he would insist on sending them out.

  She and Charles were circling the globe in 128 days. This was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime—a second honeymoon was how Charles had billed it. But the other passengers were disgusting. A young South African couple had shown up in their bathrobes for breakfast that morning in the Poseidon Grill, the premier restaurant on the ship. Charles had paid through the nose for the two of them to eat there, away from the riffraff who gobbled like starving hogs at the buffets downstairs. And last night two gay men from a lower deck had been caught naked doing God knows what in the hot tub reserved for Poseidon passengers. Gail had called the purser, complained about AIDS and STDs, and insisted that the tub be drained and disinfected.

  A woman in a hot-pink tank top, too-tight short shorts, and flip-flops appeared in the doorway of the laundry room. She eyed the mound of clothes on the counter.

  “Someone took my clothes out of the dryer,” she announced. She walked over and felt a few items between her fingertips. “Some aren’t even dry yet.”

  “Your cycle had finished,” said Gail.

  “Did you take them out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had no right to touch my property.”

  “You aren’t the only one on this ship who wants to wash clothes.” Gail looked up from Charles’s shirt at the woman, whose face had flamed an unattractive hot-flash red.

  “See how much you like it when I handle your clothes.” The woman shoved Gail’s pile of folded laundry onto the tile floor.

  “What? You fucking bitch!” Gail reached out and pressed her hot iron against the woman’s forearm.

  “Jesus frigging Christ, you bloody moron!” The woman inspected the scalded red triangle forming on her arm. She advanced with her pink fingernails flexed. Gail thrust the iron at her again, like a gladiator’s shield.

  The woman whirled around, grabbed her clothes, and marched out, saying, “Don’t think this is over yet, lady! You’ll be hearing from me!”

  “I can’t wait!” called Gail.

  Gail picked her laundry up off the floor and refolded it. Goddamn Aussie, she thought. Nothing but a bunch of convicts.

  From a rack hung a midnight blue silk gown with a plunging back. It looked to be about Gail’s size. Someone must have pressed it and left it to pick up later, maybe that repulsive Aussie. Gail unhooked it. Raising it high, along with the hangers that held Charles’s shirts, she gathered her laundry in her free arm and headed back to her room. Juggling the clothing, she pounded on the door. That annoying dyke doctor, who swaggered around the ship like a lady wrestler, had disabled their room keys to force them to remain in their cabin. But she was damned if she was going to be cooped up in there for days on end with nothing but Charles and his vomit.

  Charles opened the door, wearing his blue naval veteran cap. He relieved her of the laundry. “New dress?” He nodded at the blue silk gown.

  “Yes, I bought it in the Muscat souk.”

  “Pretty.”

  Laying the clothes on the bed for her to deal with, Charles returned to a lounge chair on the glass-fronted balcony. If he had his way, Gail reflected, he would sit there for the entire voyage while she carried him trays of food and stacks of clean clothing. She was nothing to him anymore but a very expensive maid. No one would ever believe that they had once tried every position in the Kama Sutra. Now he wouldn’t even do the missionary position. She kept urging him to use the Viagra he’d somehow acquired, but he insisted it might give him a heart attack. Time was when a heart attack would have seemed worth it to him in order to enter her properly.

  She arranged his clean clothes in his drawers. Then she opened the balcony door and told him she was going to the hairdresser and would bring him his lunch on her way back. He grunted, not even looking up from his book, a history of World War II in the Pacific. She reached across his shoulder, grabbed the book from his hands, and tossed it over the balcony railing. Its pages fluttered like a seagull’s wings as it hurtled toward the water. Charles looked up at her, saying nothing. She whirled around and stalked out of the room.

  * * *

  —

  Drago was a twentysomething from Croatia. His dark hair was shaved all over his head except for the top, where it stuck up in orange spikes. On his feet were black patent-leather ballet slippers. Gail watched him in the mirror as he clipped her hair. He was telling her about growing up gay, being raped by the more manly boys in his village. He had finally escaped to a career as a coiffeur on cruise ships. He now went back to his village only once a year, to see his elderly parents. His rapists had married, and now looked the other way when he passed them in the street.

 
Gail had no interest in hearing about any gay activities that didn’t involve hairstyling or the decoration of houses. Others in the salon had names like Olga and Bogdan and Wadim. To change the subject to something less repulsive, Gail asked Drago if he and his coworkers roamed the ship at night, looking for people whose blood they could suck.

  He smiled, but then he began regaling her with stories of his lurid escapades when the ship docked. He claimed the young men in Sydney were the hottest in the whole world. Sometimes, he continued, passengers went down to the disco in the crew bar. The crew lacked the authority to tell them to leave. Nor did they want to, because sometimes a passenger would insist on visiting one of the secret spots known only to the crew, giving his tour guide a large tip. Crew members were forbidden to fraternize with passengers. If caught, both would be thrown off at the next port. But it was in everyone’s best interests not to report one another.

  “Like where?” asked Gail.

  “Where what?”

  “Where are the secret spots?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Drago giggled.

  “But I won’t tell anyone.”

  “No, you won’t, because I won’t tell you, either!”

  “What if I go down to your disco sometime?” mused Gail.

  Drago laughed. “Well, I can’t stop you, Mrs. Savage. But I should warn you: Lots of the men at those discos are gay.”

  “But not all?”

  “A few swing both ways. And some straights come just for the dancing.”

  “Well, I might turn up there one of these nights.”

  “You could get thrown off the ship.”

  “If I got caught. But danger is part of the thrill, no?”

  Drago grinned. “For men, yes. But I thought you ladies liked everything safe and sanitized.”

  “What makes you think I’m a lady?”

  * * *

  —

  Gail stopped at the buffet and fixed a plate for Charles, a piece of white fish and lots of salad. Between his high cholesterol and high triglycerides, that was all he could eat.

  Back in the cabin, she served Charles his tray on his lounge chair and informed him that she was going to the pool. She suspected he loved this cruise because he had her trapped. She couldn’t leave him—unless she wanted to jump overboard, an idea that sometimes tempted her whenever she had to hear yet again about the hardships of life on battleships in the Pacific two thousand years ago.

  Gail put on her bikini. She looked at herself in the mirror. Not so bad. Rusty Kincaid certainly hadn’t thought so. In the end, though, he had lost his mojo during the Reverse Cowgirl and had whimpered like a big baby that he couldn’t continue. She had thrown on her galabiya and marched out his door—and hadn’t seen or heard from him since. “Easy come, easy go” was how she categorized such overeager young puppies.

  Up on the pool deck, Gail discovered that all the chairs she liked, the ones with soft cushions, had been taken. Either people were sitting in them or they had left towels and books on them. The rule was that if people tried to reserve chairs, you were entitled to hand their stuff to the deck boy and take the chair for yourself.

  She studied the chairs, trying to decide whether she wanted to be in the sun or the shade. Finally selecting one in the sun, she walked over to it and set down her bag. She picked up the towel, book, and suntan lotion that were supposedly claiming it and carried them to the deck boy. Sitting down, she slathered herself with suntan lotion. Then she lay back and opened her book, a romance set in the nineteenth century, about a sea voyage on which a fetching female passenger managed to captivate the surly captain and travel with him by sail all over the known world.

  The sun was so hot that she quickly dozed off. She awoke, to find someone poking her shoulder. She looked up and saw a tattoo of a coiled snake running along the hairy forearm of the man who had awakened her.

  “I’m sorry, madam, but you seem to have taken my chair.” His ankle was wrapped in an Ace bandage, and he was balanced on crutches. A gimp. Tough luck for him.

  “It’s against the rules to save a chair if you aren’t there to sit in it.”

  “I was only gone for a few minutes.”

  Glancing at her phone, Gail said, “You were gone for over an hour.”

  “Lady, if I weren’t a gentleman, I’d hate to think what I might do to you.”

  “And if I weren’t a lady, I’d charge you with assault for shaking my shoulder while I was sleeping.”

  “So where the hell is my stuff?”

  Gail shrugged. “I gave it to the deck boy. He probably took it to the purser. That’s what they do when someone tries to hog a chair he isn’t using.”

  He glared at her with narrowed eyes. “Aren’t you the same woman who pushed me down the steps on the top deck this morning?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She fixed her eyes firmly on her novel.

  * * *

  —

  Jessie studied the large triangular burn on the forearm of the woman in the pink tank top. “How did this happen?”

  “I burned myself on an iron in the laundry room.”

  Jessie filled a basin with cool water and placed the woman’s forearm in it. While it soaked, she retrieved some ointment and gauze. “Don’t break the blisters if you can avoid it.”

  Jessie patted the arm dry and applied a thin coat of ointment and a loose bandage. “Elevate your arm and take ibuprofen for the pain. And stay away from that laundry room!”

  The woman laughed. “With pleasure! My husband tells me that passengers who get into fights are thrown off the ship at the next port. Is that true?”

  “So they say. I haven’t seen it yet myself, but I’ve only been on this ship for a few days. Are you planning to fight with someone?”

  “No, but I’d like to!”

  * * *

  —

  Jessie sat by herself in the officers’ dining room, eating frutti di mare over linguine. She could have gone to a guest dining room, but the first time she tried that, her badge reading SHIP’S PHYSICIAN had betrayed her. Passengers had swarmed her and regaled her with the gruesome details of their endless ailments. She hadn’t been able to eat a bite. So she had dined alone or with the nurses in this lounge ever since.

  Ben came over carrying a plate of the linguine. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Delighted.”

  He sat down in a bentwood armchair and unfolded his napkin. “There’s a show tonight in the theater. Any interest in going with me?”

  Jessie thought it over. Sitting alone in her tiny room with flashbacks to Kat’s death, or sitting with Ben at a mediocre talent show? “Sure. Why not?”

  After Ben and she had finished their decaf, they strolled along the carpeted corridor to the theater and found seats near the back so that either could slip out for an emergency at the clinic. Jessie enjoyed the high-kicking dancers and the Broadway show tunes, all somehow connected to a plot she couldn’t quite grasp. But it was relaxing just to sit there and watch and listen, without having to take charge of anything. That was what she missed most by being a physician—passivity. People always looked to her for leadership in times of crisis, but sometimes she longed just to follow.

  Kat would have loved this performance. She had adored all kinds of music, blues and country, folk and classical, gospel and rock and opera—everything except rap numbers with lyrics about raping and killing women. She had sung in choirs at church and at school as a girl, and had often broken into song around the condo in her off-key alto voice. She had played a baritone ukulele, poorly but with great fervor, often serenading their grandchildren with her signature rendition of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’.”

  Mona Paradiso, who, the program said, had been trained as an opera singer, came out in a form-hugging black gown and strappy heels
. Around her neck was a silver collar with a green stone in the center. Jessie started. She had given Kat a collar just like that, from a silversmith in Provincetown, for her sixtieth birthday. Emerald had been her birthstone.

  In a wondrous alto voice, the woman began singing a slow song Jessie didn’t recognize. As she sang, the emotional pitch in the room began to rise. By the time she got to the chorus, the chronically aloof British were clapping in a startled flurry, not quite approving of themselves for showing so much uncynical enthusiasm. One man whistled weakly through his fingers. A few others called out timid encouragement, as though at a gospel revival of Anglo-Saxons.

  The woman continued relentlessly:

  I knew someday

  That you would fly away

  For love’s the greatest healer to be found

  So leave me if you need to,

  I will still remember

  Angel flying too close to the ground….

  Jessie pulled out her pager, pretended to check a message, and then whispered to Ben, “Sorry, gotta go.”

  He glanced at her, surprised, as she slid from her seat and raced out of the theater. Wrenching open the door to the walking deck and slipping through it, she grabbed the railing and doubled over in the balmy night air, gasping for breath while her heart raced. Her sign from Kat had arrived, delivered by that singer with the emerald birthstone at her throat.

  Chapter 5

  Wine-Dark Seas

  Jessie stood on the crew deck at the top of the ship. Crew smokers on break were puffing away behind her. Like those in the smoking sections on airplanes before they were banned, these smokers were a loud and jolly bunch who seemed to be having much more fun than nonsmokers. Apparently they were choosing to lead foreshortened but hilariously cheerful lives.

  Jessie was studying the ocean as intently as she had studied Lake Champlain for the many years during which she and Kat had lived on its shore. The lake had intrigued them both. They used to discuss the wonders of water, the universal solvent, how many crucial functions it served, from drinking to cleaning to transport, how it could shift seamlessly from ice to mist to fog to raindrops or snowflakes. They bought an old pontoon boat with green vinyl seats and beige indoor/outdoor carpeting and floated around the lake every chance they got, studying the interplay among the water, winds, and clouds. They also endlessly dragged grandchildren around it on inflatable rafts or water skis or boogie boards.