Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  The surface of this sea was equally fascinating, constantly shifting from glassy to rippled to surging, from lapis lazuli to cerulean to midnight blue. This afternoon the surface was as smooth as a mirror, disturbed only by the bulbous bow of the Amphitrite as it nosed its way through deep indigo water that reminded Jessie of a phrase from some distant Greek text that had never made much sense to her—“wine-dark seas.” Wasn’t wine purple? Weren’t seas various shades of blue or green?

  This very same observation had driven Kat crazy one summer afternoon as they sat sipping Sancerre on their deck overlooking Lake Champlain.

  “Must you always be so literal?” she had demanded of Jessie.

  “Yes, I must,” Jessie had replied. “I’m a physician. If you had an appendicitis, how would you like it if I removed your ovary because it reminded me of your appendix?”

  Kat had grown up in the South, that steamy green land of dreamers and fanatics. Coming north for college had been for her like a polar plunge. She spoke of the shock of seeing snow piled higher than people’s heads along the Boston sidewalks, of hearing packed snow squeak underfoot as she walked, of feeling the sides of her nostrils freeze together as she inhaled. Life in the North was a serious business. If you weren’t industrious in summer, you could freeze or starve in winter. The idle drifting and musing that entertained southerners would be a death sentence in Massachusetts or Vermont. Kat always used to say that the South had produced so many fiction writers because it was the only place in the nation where people could sit still long enough to write a novel.

  The Amphitrite was now paralleling the coast of southern Oman. A row of sawtooth peaks and bare rounded summits separated the coast from the inland desert. Through her earbuds Jessie was listening to Willie Nelson sing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” still trying to make sense of last night in the theater when Mona Paradiso had sung this song so powerfully that Jessie’s overheated imagination had convinced her it was a message direct from Kat. Probably such goofy delusions were just a phase of the grieving process.

  Jessie was unaccustomed to losing her head. It was a family tradition to become calm, cool, and efficient in the face of heightened emotion. She had first become aware of this phenomenon as a little girl. While visiting her grandparents in their antique brick farmhouse in rural Vermont, she had been stung by a bee. She began gasping for air. Instead of consoling her, her grandfather went quiet and appeared to withdraw into himself. Then he strode to the refrigerator, retrieved a syringe, and gave her a shot. Only once she was breathing normally again did he kiss her sting and paste a star-shaped Band-Aid on it.

  But she had often witnessed in her father and in her brothers, who had also become physicians, this same detachment during crises, followed by rapid action. And she had had to develop that capacity herself in order to run her ER. So the knowledge that she had panicked and fled the theater when that woman was singing more than startled her. Could she be losing her edge?

  She felt someone tapping her shoulder. Turning, she discovered Ben standing beside her in his officer whites. Reluctantly, she removed her earbuds and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey. Quite the view, huh?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “See those mountains?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “The history of our species is being rewritten there right now.”

  “How so?”

  “Archaeologists have unearthed some stone tools there that are over one hundred thousand years old, made in the same style as tools in Sudan from the same era. Which means that Homo sapiens left Africa earlier than anyone ever thought, and probably came to those mountains and spread north—rather than heading north into Asia and Europe through the Middle East.”

  Jessie looked at him. “I had no idea you were interested in such things, Ben.”

  “I was an archaeology major at Amherst. I never really wanted to be a doctor. I just did it to please my father.”

  “And did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Please your father?”

  “No. He wanted me to be a surgeon, not an ER doc.”

  “So you might just as well have been an archaeologist and pleased yourself?”

  He nodded with a rueful purse to his lips.

  “How come I never knew this about you, Ben? After all, we did date for several months.”

  “I think we were always so busy at Roosevelt that none of us ever really knew each other. For instance, I never knew that you preferred to sleep with women.”

  “I didn’t when we were together.”

  “When did you discover that you did?”

  “Well, after you, I dated a few guys. I married one and gave birth to a son and a daughter, Anthony and Cady. Then I fell in love with a woman, and we had an important relationship for several years. After that ended, I dated a few more women. And then Kat came along, and we stayed together until she died. And now I’m nothing. So whatever that makes me is what I am.”

  “Bisexual?”

  Jessie shrugged. “Maybe so. I certainly loved them all, at the time.” She smiled.

  “Good to know,” murmured Ben. “Do you want to eat lunch with me, whoever you may be?”

  “I’d like that.”

  After lunch, Jessie went down to the clinic for afternoon hours. She prescribed antibiotics for an Irishman’s UTI. Then she phoned the purser to reinstate the room keys for several patients who had emerged from quarantine. The threat of a norovirus epidemic seemed to be receding.

  She reflected on how much less exciting the Amphitrite’s clinic was than the Burlington ER. Is this what it would feel like to retire, suddenly having time to think about all the topics you’d avoided your whole life long? The average age of passengers must have been about sixty, so most of her cases now involved UTIs, constipation, seasickness, respiratory infections, and arthritis pain. Strokes and heart attacks would be something else again, but thankfully she hadn’t confronted one of those yet. Nor had she seen the more dramatic injuries Ben described, those incurred by the young men belowdecks who enjoyed a wild nightlife and performed dangerous tasks in the engine room and on tall ladders around the decks.

  A small older woman in a pink linen jacket arrived at the desk. “I’m afraid I’ve lost a tooth.” She opened her hand to reveal a white porcelain crown on her palm.

  “Lucky you didn’t swallow it,” said Jessie.

  “It was a close call.”

  Jessie ushered her to the examining room and helped her up on the table. She shone a flashlight into the woman’s mouth and located the stub where the cap belonged. “No problems that I can see. I can glue it back on for you.”

  “That would be wonderful,” said the woman. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am. But how did you know that?”

  “I live on this ship. I come to this clinic whenever I have a health issue. And you weren’t here the last time I came.”

  “I just got on in Hong Kong. The doctor who was supposed to staff this clinic got sick himself. But you say you live on the ship?”

  “Yes, I have a permanent cabin on deck six.”

  “So you just sail around and around the globe?”

  “That’s right. In return for my fare, I get all my meals, a place to live, transportation. It’s more fun than assisted living—and it’s actually cheaper, if you can believe it.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “Some of the staff are my friends by now. Interesting new guests from all over the world board at every major port. I work on sewing projects in my cabin. I take line-dancing lessons and exercise in the gym. My children and grandchildren get on at one port and off at another.”

  “Don’t they worry about you?”

  “They did at first, but I finally convinced them that this is how I want to live out my
final years, rather than annoying them with my needs. Now they enjoy traveling to exotic places in order to check up on me.”

  Jessie put some glue into the cavity of the cap and said, “Open wide.” She fit the cap on the stub and pressed down hard. “Don’t eat or drink anything for several hours. And avoid chewy things like bagels or sticky toffee pudding for several days. You should be fine.”

  The woman hopped off the table.

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” said Jessie as she ushered the woman to the door.

  “Stop by my cabin sometime for tea,” suggested the woman. “Number six oh four two.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  * * *

  —

  At midnight, Gail Savage listened to Charles’s steady breathing and concluded that he was soundly asleep. She slipped out of bed and donned her Gucci skinny jeans, Versace T-shirt, and ostrich-skin cowboy boots. In the bathroom, she brushed her hair and bunched it into a ponytail with a scrunchie. She put on some lipstick and eye shadow and liner. Gazing critically at her face in the mirror, she finally puckered her lips and blew herself an air kiss. So far, she had managed to keep the good looks that had earned her the title of Miss Florida Power and Light when she was sixteen. Once her looks were gone, though, she knew she was done for. Charles would probably be dead. She could collect a portion of his Social Security once she turned sixty. He had assigned her a life estate, which would allow her to live in their beachfront condo, and had made her beneficiary of an insurance policy. But he felt so guilty toward his first wife and their children that he had left everything else to them. They despised Gail for stealing their husband and father, so they would no doubt find a way to evict her from the condo. She had skipped college to marry Charles, and she had no skills, apart from seduction. She would probably wind up living on the streets. But meanwhile, she intended to enjoy herself as much as possible, like a midge dancing in the fading autumn sunlight. And if she happened to alight on a man who would save her from her future as a bag lady, so much the better.

  Taking the elevator as far down into the belly of the ship as it would go, she emerged and looked around for the action. She could hear the thumping of an electric bass, so she followed it like jungle drums down the main corridor. Reaching the door to the crew bar, she drew a deep breath. Then she pushed open the door and strode in like a sheriff entering a barroom full of bandits. She was blasted by the sound of “Y.M.C.A.” and the sight of several dozen bare-chested men forming letters in unison with their arms, like Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. Gail plunged into the pulsing mass and started gesticulating along with them, while her neighboring dancers stared at her like stags encountering an albino hind.

  When the song ended, many young men gathered around, offering to buy her a beer. She accepted this offer from a shirtless young man with a red bandanna headband, who had a nearly hairless chest and six-pack abs. When he returned with a Corona for her, his rivals faded away.

  “Where did you swoop in from, beautiful lady?” he asked with a lazy smile.

  “The tenth floor. Not much happening up there. I see now where all the action is!”

  “Any action you might desire,” he assured her.

  At that moment Pedro, her room steward, appeared at her elbow, and Bandanna Boy moved aside. “You shouldn’t be down here, Mrs. Savage.”

  She looked at him. “So who are you now, Pedro, my father?”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about, madam. It’s these boys. They could lose their jobs for getting mixed up with a guest.”

  “Not my problem, Pedro. We’ve paid big bucks to be on this ship, and I’ll go wherever I please.”

  “They’re all supporting families back home,” he explained in a voice that was almost pleading.

  “Go to bed, Grandpa. Let us kids have our fun.”

  “Will it be fun when you and they get kicked off the ship at the next port?”

  “We’ll worry about that if it happens.”

  Pedro grabbed Bandanna Boy and spoke to him fiercely in Spanish. Gail grabbed his other arm and dragged him back to the scrum of dancers writhing away to the strains of Abba shrieking “Waterloo.” Spotting the orange spikes on the head of Drago from the hair salon, she waved. He waved back deliriously. Then she whirled around and pressed her butt against Bandanna Boy’s tight jeans, twitching it from side to side. Soon he was hunched over her, moving his hips in and out, while the other dancers cheered and whistled.

  * * *

  —

  Jessie sat in the theater at the weekly staff meeting with those who weren’t currently guiding the ship. The head of security, Major Thapa, a former Nepali Gurkha with the British army, was explaining why there had been such an upsurge in pirate attacks off the Somali coast in recent years. The major looked to be as short as Jessie, but with a neck as thick as a bull’s. He was describing how fishing fleets from other countries had invaded Somali waters, depleting the fish population, on which Somali fishermen depended for their livelihoods. At first Somali “pirates” were merely angry fishermen trying to scare off these foreign ships. Eventually, though, Islamist terror groups discovered that they could capture large cargo ships and force their crews to operate them as “mother ships” on which pirates could live while prowling the seas in their small speedboats.

  Captain Kilgore took over the podium as a map appeared on the movie screen behind him. With a laser beam he pointed out their current position at the head of the Gulf of Aden, with Yemen to the north and Somalia to the south. The ship would proceed along a banana-shaped path called the International Recommended Transit Corridor. The section of this corridor with the most frequent pirate attacks, known as “Pirate Alley,” would be transited at night, when attacks were less frequent.

  “But the most important thing,” Captain Kilgore said, “is not to alarm our vacationing guests. With this goal in mind, we have removed the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips from the in-cabin TV selections. Just as a precaution, we will also stage a Safe Haven drill this afternoon so that everyone on board will understand the steps required from us all to safeguard our vessel in the very unlikely event of an attack. Staff and crew without other assignments are expected to participate as though they were passengers.”

  As Jessie and Ben exited the theater, she shot him an indignant glance. “How come you never mentioned pirates when you offered me this job?”

  He smiled. “You might not have accepted it.”

  “You’re damn right.”

  “Don’t get excited. Pirates have attacked yachts and container ships. But they don’t mess with cruise ships. Besides, there are all kinds of defenses in place that no one talks about.”

  “Like what?”

  “How would I know? I told you that no one talks about them.”

  “Then how do you know that they even exist?”

  “Rumors.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of satellites overhead, and of submarines and warships nearby. Please don’t worry, Jess. If we weren’t absolutely safe, the cruise line would have altered the route. They can’t afford lawsuits or bad word of mouth from unhappy passengers.”

  As Jessie descended to the clinic in the service elevator, she wondered whether she would have thought twice about signing on for this voyage if she’d known about the pirates. It was supposed to be a lighthearted lark, but it was beginning to sound more like her father’s stories of dodging German U-boats on the North Atlantic during World War II. He had sailed on a British Merchant Navy vessel that was escorting a convoy of Liberty ships full of soldiers from New York Harbor. Every day he rode on an inflatable boat to a different troopship, clutching his medical bag, in order to give shots of penicillin to the hundreds of soldiers with syphilis. He said he had shuddered to think about loosing those hordes of diseased American men on the women of England and France. One night he had to perform
an appendectomy using dinner forks as retractors, since no one had thought to equip the ship’s clinic with medical instruments. While he sliced open his patient, his ship sent down depth charges against a swarm of U-boats below them. Afterward, he stood on deck as the sun rose and watched drowned German sailors surface amid the oil slicks from their destroyed submarines.

  * * *

  —

  Jessie sat on the floor in the hallway outside her cabin for the pirate drill, her back against the wall. With one hand, she held the railing above her head. They had been instructed to close their curtains, lock balcony doors, and turn off the lights in their cabins. It was important to stay in the corridor away from the windows, and to hold the railing to avoid being thrown around the hallway if the ship had to perform evasive maneuvers.

  Glancing to her right, Jessie discovered that her neighbor, sprawled in the corridor in torn jeans and a Broadway Cares T-shirt, was the woman who had sung so mesmerizingly the other night.

  “Hi,” called Jessie. “I guess we’re neighbors.”

  “Yeah, looks like it.”

  “I loved that angel song you sang the other night.”

  “Thanks. I like it, too.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Jessie couldn’t stop herself from glancing at the woman’s scrambled auburn hair. Kat’s had looked similar when she and Jessie had met. Kat had been several years older than she. Jessie had always admired the older Vermonters who had lived in communes and protested the Vietnam War and established food co-ops and free clinics and abortion centers. Jessie’s peers had mostly sat around smoking pot and railing against monogamy. Jessie had asked for an autograph after Kat’s reading from a novel at a local college. This had led to weekly lunches or dinners—and eventually to a romance so compelling that they had moved together into the condo on the lake. After their first decade, Kat’s hair had become frosted with gray. By the time Kat died, her entire head had turned what they decided to call “fox silver.” Now Jessie’s hair had gone fox silver, too.