Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  “You must be exhausted if you danced all day.”

  “Yeah, I am. By the way, did you find that Haydn piece on YouTube?”

  “Yes. It was really lovely.”

  “Did you see what I mean about its suiting you?”

  “Well, I’m flattered that you think so, Mona. But I should warn you that I can be just as stressed-out as anyone else.”

  Mona smiled tightly. “And just as unable to accept a compliment?”

  “I accept it with thanks. But I also think that you don’t know me very well.”

  “Yet.”

  Jessie smiled and nodded. “Yet.”

  “Any new developments with our perfidious boyfriend?” inquired Mona.

  “I saw him in passing at the clinic. He seemed glum.”

  “With any luck, we’re driving him as crazy as he was driving us.”

  “You know what, Mona? I’m not really into this caper anymore. But please feel free to have a thing with Ben if you want to.”

  Mona said nothing for a long time, slowly stirring her whiskey sour with her swizzle stick.

  Finally she looked up at Jessie with an annoyed expression. “Thanks, but I don’t need your permission. You’re not my mother.”

  Jessie gave a startled laugh. “I never imagined that I was!”

  Jessie reflected that it probably made sense to keep your distance from other people. Who knew what insane archetypes existing only in their own addled brains they might try to wedge you into?

  She looked out the window at the glimmering lights of Port Said, where terrorists disguised as crew had hijacked the Achille Lauro and murdered a man for being handicapped and Jewish. She and Mona sat in awkward silence as the ship moved into the Mediterranean. A brisk wind from the north began to clear out the torrid desert air, while a white-capped breaker lifted the giant ship toward the flickering stars that had popped out overhead.

  During the night, the ship would dock at Alexandria. Charles Savage’s corpse would be off-loaded there in the morning. Jessie would spend the day trying to decipher the city’s appeal for Kat. How Mona spent her day was of no concern whatsoever to Jessie. Mona Paradiso, indeed! It sounded like a pseudonym for a porn star. No wonder the Met hadn’t wanted her.

  Chapter 10

  Palimpsest

  They waited until the other passengers had departed on their excursions around Alexandria before removing the body bag containing Charles Savage from the refrigerated morgue. Eva Cummings from Guest Services was standing on the quay with Gail Savage, who was wearing her now-signature dark glasses and black head scarf. Ben, in his whites, was talking to an Alexandrian harbor official. Pushing the gurney off the ship was the maintenance man who had fought the pirates so bravely. He kept glancing at Gail as though trying to catch her eye, but she refused to look at him. His face was haggard. He appeared to have it bad.

  Jessie walked over to Gail. Gail removed her sunglasses, revealing her startling turquoise eyes. She said in a choked voice, “Thank you again, Doctor, for trying to save Charles that night.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Jessie. “I’m sorry I wasn’t successful.”

  “I knew he had a bad heart, but I didn’t realize how bad. I should have taken better care of him.”

  “Heart attacks are impossible to predict, Mrs. Savage. You shouldn’t fault yourself.” Gail seemed to have undergone a metamorphosis, from a narcissistic beauty queen to a perpetually grieving mourner on leave from Giotto’s Lamentation of Christ.

  “Thank you. That helps me with my guilt for not having been there when he needed me. It’s hard to bear thinking about the wonderful life he gave me, and how I just took his kindness and generosity for granted.”

  Jessie blinked. Who was this woman? “Where is home?” she finally asked.

  “Daytona Beach.”

  “So you’re heading back there today?”

  “No, I’ve decided to continue on the Amphitrite to Key West. I know Charles would want me to. He was so happy to be back at sea with his shipmates from the Battle of Okinawa. I’m going to buy an urn for his ashes so that he, too, can complete what was supposed to be our journey of a lifetime.”

  Jessie nodded, doing her best to convey the impression that she found this behavior sane. But it would never have occurred to her to bring Kat’s ashes along, no matter how much Kat might have enjoyed this voyage while alive. Still, the cruise staff was required to endorse whatever guests said or did, so long as it wasn’t illegal.

  A battered black hearse pulled up, and the driver, a modern-day Charon in a black gabardine uniform worn shiny from overuse, helped the maintenance man load the body bag into the back. Gail got into the rear seat with Eva Cummings. Charon handed Ben some papers, shook his hand, and slid into the front seat. The antique hearse shuddered away to the city morgue for an autopsy, and then onward to the crematorium.

  Jessie sauntered over to Ben. “Did you know that Mrs. Savage is finishing the cruise with her husband’s ashes in an urn?”

  Ben nodded. “What can I say? Both fares have been paid.”

  “May I have a few hours off today? There are some sites I want to visit.”

  “I see you’ve signed up to escort the bus tour to El Alamein tomorrow, so you should take the whole day off.”

  “Thanks, you’re a pal,” said Jessie.

  Ben smiled his most fetching smile, the one that displayed his cavernous dimples. “Just a pal, huh?”

  “So it would seem.” She returned his fake smile.

  “I think we must have grown too serious for casual sex, and too jaded for serious sex.”

  “Sounds about right. I think it’s called maturity.”

  “I should probably have listened to you when you said that you just aren’t that into men.”

  “What?” So now it was all about her, rather than about his wish to be with Mona instead? His duplicity had nothing to do with her lack of enthusiasm for his renewed pursuit of her?

  “Never mind, Jessie, it’s all good.” He was employing youthful jargon now, no doubt seeing himself as Mona’s peer, even though she was the age of some of his daughters. He strode jauntily back toward the vast ship, which towered a dozen stories above the quay, its many glass windows and doors reflecting the morning sun.

  Jessie shrugged. Fortunately, she didn’t really care what Ben thought or did.

  * * *

  —

  Xander stood on the quay beside the empty gurney, watching the woman he loved ride away in a hearse with the chilled corpse of her husband. Gail had been avoiding him ever since her husband’s death. He understood that she had to feign grief for her husband. But he was sure she would return to him once the required period of mourning was over. She was the most amazing woman he had ever made love to. There was nothing she wouldn’t try. Pleasing women passengers was the way he had found to supplement his meager wages. Every crew member had his or her hustle. Some cut hair for other crewmates or gave massages. Others rented out porn or cleaned the cabins of those who could afford to pay. But Xander’s chosen gig was to keep women passengers happy. In the beginning, Gail had been just another mark, strutting into the crew bar in her skinny jeans in search of some easy action with the help. But before he knew it, he’d fallen in love with her. She loved him, too, or at least that was what she moaned as he thrust into her time after time on the roof of the elevator to the cocktail lounge.

  He had even begun to imagine a future with her. She was his ticket off this floating dungeon. It had to happen soon, though, before his back gave out again. He had ruptured a disk lugging baggage. The cruise company had paid for an operation and had covered his salary for several months. But he had been required to return to work while still in pain, and the exertions Gail had inspired in him hadn’t helped his recovery. If he needed more time off or another operation, the cruise line wo
uld just cut him loose with no medical insurance and no income. The streets of Manila were lined with disabled cruise ship workers looking for physically undemanding land jobs.

  When Gail’s husband died, it seemed God’s will. Now she would have his money and would be free to be Xander’s wife. The only obstacle was his wife and three children back in the Philippines. He hadn’t mentioned them to Gail yet. It would have ruined her image of him as a freebooting buccaneer. The knowledge that he was actually a dad and a husband might turn her off. But somehow he would find a way for Gail and himself to spend the rest of their lives together, smoking hash in the sun at her beachfront condo in Daytona Beach.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the quay lurked some taxis with black roofs and fenders, and yellow chassis. Jessie took one along the narrow isthmus that separated the cruise ship harbor from the main bay, where hundreds of pleasure craft and fishing trawlers with turquoise or golden trim and hulls were straining at their mooring chains. Curving around the bay was the Corniche, a sweeping crescent lined with eight- and ten-story apartment blocks and hotels in a variety of Belle Epoque styles, some quite dilapidated.

  Partway around the Corniche, the minarets and cream-colored domes of a mosque interrupted the skyline with a reminder of who now ruled Egypt. On the far side of the crescent, a gigantic disk that housed the new library reflected the morning sun. The old library had allegedly been burned down by mistake by Julius Caesar in 48 B.C. and had just now been replaced. Beyond the library, on a tentacle of land extending into the sea, sat the rococo summer palace of King Farouk, who, according to Kat’s notes, devoured six hundred oysters per week. He had fled that palace for Italy on his royal yacht, anchored in this bay, following Nasser’s nationalist coup in the 1950s. Kat quoted him as having announced, “Soon there will be only five kings left—the King of England, the King of Spades, the King of Clubs, the King of Hearts, and the King of Diamonds.”

  The taxi arrived at a stunning fifteenth-century fortress of pale stone with round crenellated towers, built by a sultan to fend off Ottoman attacks. Jessie wandered around it, peering out at the Mediterranean through slits cut for archers and larger openings left for cannon barrels. The sea was being whipped into a froth by a strong north wind. Waves were crashing on the seawalls below, and large plumes of spray were leaping skyward, wavering and glittering in the sunlight.

  No other tourists were present, since everyone was now afraid to visit Egypt. The many bored guards paid her no attention when she sat down on a parapet on the roof of the defensive tower. She removed Kat’s notebook from her bag and read that Greeks had built the city in the third century B.C. Their 450-foot lighthouse had been a marvel of the ancient world. At night its furnace produced flames that could be seen thirty miles out to sea, to guide approaching ships into this harbor. It had been destroyed by earthquakes.

  After the Roman navy defeated Cleopatra, Alexandria became a Roman colony. Her palace, where she had seduced Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, had borne four children by them, and had committed suicide after the Roman invasion, had also been destroyed by earthquakes and tsunamis. It now lay alongside sections of the toppled lighthouse under the water in the harbor where the fishing boats were bobbing.

  Jessie returned the notebook to her bag and walked back across the causeway, past the gold and turquoise boats. Reaching the Corniche, she followed a sidewalk along the seawall. The beach below was cluttered with plastic grocery bags and drink bottles. The water itself was the unpleasant green of vomited bile. But some sunbathers were sitting at white plastic tables under garish beach umbrellas, watching their children frolic in the toxic water.

  A multilane highway separated the bay from the buildings. The creeping cars beeped at one another constantly, like a flock of migrating geese. Clouds of exhaust fumes enveloped her as she strolled along the sidewalk, trying to figure out why Alexandria had so intrigued Kat as she lay dying. She looked around for a stoplight or crosswalk but could see none. She watched the other pedestrians. They just waited for an opening among the cars and then launched themselves into the traffic, hoping for the best. She copied them and lived to reach the other side.

  Turning inland, Jessie wandered through a warren of narrow side streets, guided by a Google map on her iPhone. Eventually, she came to the dingy mustard apartment building where Cavafy had lived. The top half of its double wooden doors was decorated with wrought-iron arabesques. On the wall beside the entry, a polished brass plaque read CAVAFY MUSEUM in Greek. But a notice on the door said the museum was closed until further notice.

  Jessie followed her Google map another mile to the Greek Orthodox cemetery. Passing through a gate and beneath a leafy arbor, she wandered around until she found Cavafy’s gravestone, a white marble slab with a cross in relief toward its top. A waist-high iron fence in an Art Deco pattern threw a geometric shadow across the white marble, where someone had placed a rose that had withered. Tarnished Greek letters of inlaid copper spelled out his name and death date.

  Jessie sat down among the palms and acacias on a bench with peeling green paint. She pulled out Kat’s notebook and read that Cavafy, as he lay dying from throat cancer, unable to speak, had drawn on a piece of paper a period with a circle around it—a typesetter’s mark, well known to every writer, meaning “full stop.”

  Next Kat wrote: “The Egyptians absorbed one invasion after another—Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, French, British. Their outfits and monuments changed with each occupying army, yet they themselves remained Egyptian. They are currently disguised as Muslims. But their psyches have been shaped by the pharaohs and their pyramids. Layer upon layer of competing civilizations, yet the underlying essentials remain the same. The only constant in life is change.”

  Jessie reflected that she hadn’t really seen Alexandria today. She had been too busy trying to see inside Kat’s brain during those days when she had lain dying on the far side of the globe in a land of evergreens and snow. But the bread crumbs that Kat had scattered around Alexandria had led only to this deserted graveyard. Jessie had to confess that she was increasingly mystified by this woman with whom she had lived so happily for two decades. But had she really known her?

  * * *

  —

  Jessie ate dinner by herself at a corner table in the officers’ lounge. In another corner huddled Mona and Ben, whispering back and forth and pointedly avoiding looking her way. She was annoyed. She had done nothing to merit becoming their scapegoat—a controlling mother for Mona and a man-hating dyke for Ben. That was the problem with living on a ship. Back home, she’d have just avoided them for several months. But if they needed her as an excuse to turn to each other for sexual solace, there was nothing she could do about it. So she returned to her cabin and continued her puzzled perusal of Kat’s final journal.

  To truly understand Cavafy, and therefore Kat’s interest in him, Jessie realized she would need to go to Alexandria’s red-light district late at night—if it still existed under Islamic rule. According to Kat, Cavafy had kept a room in a brothel there, in which he had entertained a parade of handsome young men who worked as dishwashers and hustlers. Kat had copied one of his poems that memorialized them:

  Body, remember not just how much you were loved,

  not just the beds where you have lain,

  but also those longings that so openly

  glistened for you in the eyes,

  And trembled in the voice….

  Below this were several drafts of a poem Kat had evidently composed in response, with many crossed out words and arrows that shifted phrases here and there. The final version was titled “Swan Song I”:

  You’ve come undone, dear one.

  Your shoulders show their scars.

  So zip yourself up and march out my door—

  Grit your teeth, clench your fists, hide your flinch.

  Or els
e shrug those silk straps off your arms,

  And stretch out beside me right now.

  Let me tend to your wounds, soothe them with salve,

  Bathe them, and bind them in balm.

  I’ll touch you so softly tonight, my love,

  That you’ll scarcely recall all that gall.

  You’ll cry as before, but this time for joy,

  In the red through my window at dawn.

  I know your chagrin. It’s my own.

  Hope guttered and gone out.

  Promises scorched, trust turned to dust,

  Ashes and soot, smoke on the wind.

  But bloodroot can sprout in charred forests,

  When swallows swoop home from the south.

  As sun thaws the frost, mauve buds swell and burst—

  Until snow spreads its shroud in the fall.

  So stay with me now.

  Hand me your pain.

  Look in my eyes.

  Let love live again.

  Jessie laid down the journal. Kat had had her share of lovers before they met, just like every other child of the 1970s. She used to say that if gay marriage had been legal when she was in her prime, she’d have had as many ex-spouses as Zsa Zsa Gabor. But Jessie had always assumed that neither of them had been with other people while they were together. Was it possible Kat had had an affair during their relationship? Or did this poem refer to someone Kat had loved before they met? Or had it all existed only in Kat’s imagination—a preliminary sketch of some character and situation she was inventing for her next novel? Was her interest in Cavafy because he had lived the life of some gay men, with casual sexual encounters whenever he pleased? Had Kat been secretly longing for a more adventurous love life than the one she had shared with Jessie?

  Jessie struggled to get a grip. Kat had often traveled alone, doing lecture and reading tours. She had locked herself up for weeks at a time in big cities and isolated cabins to write her books uninterrupted. She had explained to Jessie that she had been the eldest daughter in a large family and had been required by her mother to baby-sit the younger children. To be alone was to her the ultimate luxury. But what if she hadn’t really been alone?