Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  Back at the clinic, Jessie and Ben pulled on latex gloves. Once they had removed Charles’s evening clothes, Ben turned him on his side so Amy could snap some photos of the lividity that had already invaded his buttocks and back. Then Ben and Jessie coordinated like Olympic rowers to check every aspect of the cooling body. Their supervisors at Roosevelt would have been proud. Afterward they returned Charles to his body bag and moved it to one of the four slots in the refrigerated morgue.

  “Do you ever run out of space?” Jessie asked as they closed the heavy door.

  “Once we did. We had to get creative.” He went over to the counter and started filling in the death certificate.

  “Please don’t tell me where you put the extra bodies.”

  The clinic door flew open. In marched Gail Savage in a navy blue silk backless gown. “Where’s my husband?”

  Jessie stepped forward. “Mrs. Savage, I’m afraid we have some bad news. Your husband suffered cardiac arrest. We weren’t able to revive him.”

  “What?”

  “I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your husband is deceased.”

  “Charles is dead?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the morgue.”

  “A cruise ship has a morgue?”

  Jessie nodded.

  Just then, a woman in a dark blue skirted uniform entered. “Mrs. Savage, I’m so terribly sorry. My name is Eva Cummings. I’m from Guest Services. I can help you with the decisions and arrangements that will need to be made.”

  Gail nodded numbly. “When did this happen?”

  “A couple of hours ago. We’ve been trying to page you, but we couldn’t locate you,” said Eva.

  Jessie studied Gail’s face for clues as to what she might have been up to that had prevented her from hearing repeated announcements all over the ship asking her to report to the clinic.

  “I was visiting a friend,” Gail murmured. “I didn’t hear the page.”

  Eva offered Gail the British antidote to all tragedy—a cup of tea. Through the clinic porthole Jessie could see that the sky was taking on the tones of a boiled lobster shell. She was suddenly swept with exhaustion.

  “Let’s meet for a drink at the Naxos Bar tonight after dinner,” said Ben as he and Jessie exited the clinic.

  “Why not?” The little erotic game Mona and Ben had been playing suddenly seemed very silly.

  “Good work last night, Jess.”

  “Thanks. That’s why I’m here.”

  Jessie went up to the fifth floor and exited onto the walking deck. The rising sun was filling the entire sky with streaks of crimson, like an infected wound. Major Thapa was standing by the railing in his dress uniform, gazing through giant binoculars at the Nubian Desert of Sudan, which stretched right down to the seashore.

  “Good morning, Major,” said Jessie.

  Thapa nodded at her. “How are you faring, Doctor?”

  “Not too well, frankly. We just lost a guest to a heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you must feel as we do when we fail to foil a pirate attack.” Major Thapa handed her his binoculars and pointed to the shore. “Take a look at the debris on that beach.”

  Jessie raised the binoculars and zeroed in on what looked like piles of branches, drenched in the bloodred dawn. But trees didn’t grow in a desert. “I give up. What is it, Major?”

  “Animal skeletons. Camels, wild goats, Barbary sheep, antelopes. Crossing the desert, they become crazed with thirst. They arrive at what they think is an oasis. They gorge on seawater and die of dehydration on the sand.”

  “But that’s so sad.”

  He nodded. “Life in general is pretty sad, don’t you think?”

  “After the night I’ve just passed, I’d have to agree with you.”

  Back in her cabin, Jessie undressed and climbed into bed. Charles Savage’s body was now chilling in the morgue. The force that had animated it had departed. Was this force still intact somewhere else, or had it dissipated into the stratosphere?

  Kat’s body had been cremated, reverting to the stardust from which it had been composed. This stardust now lay in Kat’s ebony jewelry box on the mantel in their Vermont condo. Kat had asked for her ashes to be strewn across the shimmering waters of Lake Champlain, but Jessie hadn’t yet been able to part with them. She needed to face up to that task so that Kat and she could both move on. But she didn’t want to move on. She wanted to go back.

  Chapter 8

  Trios and Quartets

  “Have you recovered from our traumatic night?” Ben asked Jessie as they sat in comfy fabric chairs at a small round table in the Naxos Bar, overlooking the bow of the ship as it plowed through the waters of the Red Sea. Ben had kindly run the clinic all day long, dealing mostly with hangovers from the Flappers Ball and with sprains and bruises sustained by those who had fallen off the chairs they had clambered up onto while braying “Rule, Britannia!”

  “I’m fine.” Jessie removed the cherry on the swizzle stick of her manhattan with her front teeth. “I appreciate your concern, but I can’t tell you how many deaths I’ve overseen recently. Mostly overdoses.”

  “It’s different at sea. Sometimes the ship is so far out that even the coast guard and helicopters can’t reach us to transport emergencies to land.”

  “Well, it’s what we’ve been trained for.”

  “But it can still be unnerving when you recognize the reality. It’s like being stuck back in the nineteenth century, with inadequate equipment and diagnostic tools.”

  “I can take it.”

  “I know you can. That’s why I asked you to sign on for this job. You’re one cool chick. I always used to admire your sangfroid at Roosevelt. It seemed to come naturally to you.”

  “It runs in my family. It’s turning it off that has always been a challenge for me.”

  Ben nodded in agreement. “You were never an easy nut to crack!”

  Jessie looked at him, hiding her annoyance at his possible implication that their failed relationship was solely her fault.

  “Did you hear that the ship is skipping the Egyptian ports on the Red Sea and diverting to Aqaba, in Jordan, instead?” he asked.

  “I heard, but I wasn’t sure why.”

  “Too much political turmoil in Egypt since the ouster of Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood is out for blood. The cruise line doesn’t want to risk docking at Suez and sending passengers on buses to Cairo and Giza. They’re offering excursions to Petra instead, which suits me fine, because there are some amazing digs going on there.”

  “Can I go to Petra, too, or do I need to run the clinic?”

  “Hardly anyone turns up at the clinic on shore days, and there’s a good hospital in Aqaba. So I think we can leave Amy in charge and both go to Petra.”

  “Tell me about these digs.” Anything in order to sidestep a confrontation over plagiarized love poems. Jessie was regretting that she hadn’t put a stop to Mona’s half-baked vendetta. Just because Ben had behaved in bad faith was no reason for them to descend to his level.

  “Well, Petra was the primary town for the Nabateans, an Arab tribe that controlled the land route from southern Arabia to Gaza, where frankincense and myrrh were shipped to Rome. It was carved out of cliffs of rose-colored limestone about the time of the birth of Christ. So the archaeologists at the dig sites are trying to work out how the carving was done so high up on cliffs with no evidence of scaffolding. And also how a city of thirty thousand people could have existed amid arid mountains with no water sources.”

  “And how could it?”

  “They piped water from springs many miles away, and they constructed a series of sluices and dams to trap and store rainwater. They created an artificial oasis. It was a brilliant feat of engineering.”

  They
were sitting in the rear corner of the lounge, right up against the wall. Apparently Ben was trying to conceal their rendezvous, presumably from Mona if she should show up there. Jessie knew for a fact that this would happen because she and Mona had already arranged it. A pianist was playing soft jazz, but Jessie could have sworn she had been hearing voices through the wall behind them. And now she heard rustlings and thuds. Could the ship be infested with rats?

  “Do you hear that?” she asked Ben.

  He paused to listen. Then he placed his ear against the wall. “Someone is having sex.”

  “Inside the wall?”

  “I’m just telling you what I hear.”

  “Let’s move. It’s annoying.” In his current state, Ben would probably eroticize anything.

  Carrying their drinks, they shifted forward to another table.

  “So what does the diversion from Suez mean for Mrs. Savage? I thought she was going to leave the ship there with her husband’s body.”

  Gail Savage had moved from the room on the tenth deck where her husband had died to an empty suite the next deck up. She was doing full Jackie Kennedy mourning in large sunglasses, a black head scarf with its ends knotted behind her neck, and dark draped garments that concealed her shapely physique. She had been spotted all over the ship, gazing silently out to sea over railings and through portholes, like the lead diva in a Fellini film. At the moment she was seated at a table across the room with a balding gentleman host, who was patting her hand while she wept, still wearing her sunglasses, even though the sun had long since set.

  “That was the plan,” replied Ben. “I called the medical officer on the Aqaba docks, but they don’t have the facilities for her to disembark there. And Captain Kilgore doesn’t want anyone to go ashore at Port Said, at the north end of the Suez Canal, for security reasons. So she’ll have to wait for Alexandria.”

  “How long can her husband’s body stay in the morgue?”

  “A week, max. It’s already been there for a day. But we’ll reach Alexandria in four or five more days, so that should work out fine.”

  They both fell silent, feeling the presence of Charles Savage’s chilled corpse eight decks below them, like an alligator in the sewers of Manhattan.

  Just then, Mona arrived. She waved enthusiastically. Ben looked alarmed.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Delighted,” said Jessie.

  “Uh, sure.” Ben stood up to pull over a spare chair from another table.

  A waiter arrived and Mona ordered a mojito. “So what nefarious schemes are you two cooking up?”

  “We were just talking about the trip to Petra tomorrow,” said Jessie.

  “I’ve always wanted to see Petra!”

  “Why don’t you come with us?” asked Jessie.

  Both looked at Ben. He was studying his Rolex intently. “You probably don’t want to be away from the ship for a full day,” he said hopefully. “It’s a two-hour bus ride over there. A two-mile hike down a canyon under a scorching sun. Two miles back out. Two hours back to the ship. I’m sure you must have important rehearsals.”

  “Nothing I can’t get out of,” Mona assured him.

  Under the tiny table, Mona’s knee brushed Jessie’s. Jessie was annoyed to feel a frisson. Her unruly body had always had a mind of its own. Her brain had had to expend a lot of energy making it behave over the years.

  “It’ll be great!” Mona told Ben. “I can’t wait!”

  The three gamely matched one another drink for drink until Jessie realized she would never make it to the bus in the morning if she didn’t stop. She excused herself and left Mona to cope with an increasingly disgruntled Ben, who had evidently never experienced the delights of an equilateral triangle. He seemed unaccustomed to not being the sole focus of every woman’s attention.

  * * *

  —

  The Amphitrite passengers on the Aqaba quay milled around, searching for their buses. Some were going to stay overnight in Louis Vuitton tents and share a feast of roasted camel calves with a tribe of bewildered Bedouins. Others were riding camels to sites around Aqaba associated with Lawrence of Arabia’s skirmishes with the Ottomans, prior to his capture and rape in their jail.

  Ben, Jessie, and Mona finally located their bus to Petra. Mona and Jessie sat together, while Ben sat behind them in glum silence. They passed guidebooks back and forth and snapped iPhone photos out the window of Bedouin encampments of black tents and vast herds of woolly sheep.

  After emerging from the bus into a parking lot, the three walked side by side down a narrow limestone chute, a fissure formed by an ancient earthquake. The rose-tan-and-gray-striated walls on either side loomed so high that they blocked out the sky, turning the passageway dim and shadowy. They stopped to inspect low ledges along the walls. Ben pointed out the declivities in them that had once contained clay pipes to conduct water from distant springs.

  A rickety old carriage with a black leather hood careened past them, drawn by a gaunt horse with prominent ribs. A young man in Arab headgear was flogging it with a riding crop.

  The elderly British woman passenger was calling, “Young man! Young man! Stop mistreating that horse this instant, or I promise you I will climb down and walk! Without paying your fare, mind you!”

  The carriage with its flapping leather hood hurtled on past them down the canyon, scattering pedestrians like pigeons before a peregrine falcon.

  At last the three rounded a curve in the path, and there before them, carved into a cliffside of rose limestone several hundred feet high, was a façade with giant pillars, pediments, and cornices that featured a bizarre mélange of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian details. They stood completely still, stunned by the enormity, magnificence, and incongruity of the structure.

  Another kamikaze carriage appeared behind them, the clattering of the horse’s hooves echoing throughout the ravine. Dodging out of its trajectory, they continued their stunned inspection of the building that guidebooks labeled “the Treasury.”

  Finally turning right and continuing down the pathway that Ben said had been the main street, they reached a small amphitheater carved into another cliff of rose limestone. On rocky ledges around the amphitheater perched small templelike buildings with ornate Greco-Roman doorways.

  “What are those?” Jessie asked Ben.

  “Tombs.”

  “They scattered their tombs up and down the main street of town?”

  “The ancient Arabs didn’t quarantine the dead from the living as we do.”

  He pointed out a central plaza where pools, canals, and groves of date palms had once flourished. The Nabateans had maintained their artificial oasis for several centuries. Now it had reverted to a parched and rocky wasteland.

  “What the hell happened to this town?” asked Jessie.

  “The usual,” said Ben. “Invasions by Romans, Persians, Arabs. Earthquakes and floods.”

  While Ben clambered around the cliffs, inspecting what was left of the hydraulic system and chatting with the archaeologists, Mona and Jessie climbed up to one of the small tombs and ducked inside. The stone floor and walls were completely bare, but a forest of freestanding pillars of striped limestone supported the ceiling. Many coffin-size niches had been hollowed into the walls. Grave robbers or archaeologists must have long since plundered any skeletons or grave goods.

  It was cool and dark there, so they sat down on the ground by the doorway and gazed out at the merciless desert sun baking the swarms of tourists wandering amid the arid debris of the once-green and prosperous town.

  “I think my plan to torture Ben isn’t working,” announced Mona.

  “Has he said anything to you about your note or poem?”

  “No. But at least it may have stopped him in his tracks. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with us both at once.”

  Jessie nodd
ed wearily. What was this—middle school? They sat in silence while the hum of the more conscientious tourists rose up from the valley floor.

  “I always think of other people in terms of pieces of music. Do you know which you remind me of?” asked Mona.

  “Which?”

  “Haydn’s String Quartet number ten in A Major.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t know it.”

  “See if you can find it on YouTube when we get back. It’s definitely you. It exudes a quietly contained passion.”

  Jessie couldn’t think of anything to say in response. Thank you? But Mona’s remark sounded like a line she might have used on someone else—a line that had probably already worked on someone else.

  “Thanks, I’ll check it out,” Jessie finally replied.

  Ben eventually came to retrieve them, and they struggled back up the narrow stone gorge, in and out of the sunlight, dodging the lurching carriages, until they arrived at their bus. As they boarded, Ben managed to slip into the seat beside Mona. That worked fine for Jessie. She dozed while Ben regaled Mona with the entire archaeological history of the Arabian Peninsula.

  Back at the ship, they went their separate ways—or at least Jessie presumed they did. In any case, Jessie went to her cabin and located the Haydn quartet on YouTube. Listening to it, she was quite perplexed. It was a gorgeous piece, calm and soothing. Anyone would have been flattered to be compared to it. So what was Mona Paradiso up to now? All she wanted, Jessie told herself, was to mourn Kat in peace.

  The Internet was suddenly working well, so her e-mails that had accumulated during the days at sea downloaded all at once. Cady wrote about one of her foster children, who was having sex with her foster brother. She attached a drawing her daughter Maya had done at kindergarten of Jessie, dressed in scrubs, with a purple stethoscope around her neck, standing atop a ship surrounded by water full of colorful fish. Anthony brought her up-to-date on personnel problems at the Burlington ER. Martin wrote about difficulties with some organic suppliers for his farm-to-table restaurant. Malcolm’s son had underperformed on his ACTs. On and on it went. Together, she and Kat had dealt with their children’s and grandchildren’s issues. Alone, Jessie doubted she could do it anymore. She had journeyed to the underworld and back three times during the last two years. She was half-dead herself. She had nothing left to give.