by Lisa Alther
Yet surely if Kat had been longing for or pursuing Cavafy’s erotic lifestyle, she wouldn’t have written about it in a journal that Jessie was bound to read. She wouldn’t have wanted to hurt Jessie with such a startling revelation. But what if she’d been so out of it on morphine during her final days that she had simply forgotten to destroy this journal?
If Kat had been in love with someone else, why couldn’t she have just said so? They would have dealt with it—or not. Jessie recalled an argument between them in their condo living room in which she had ended up asking Kat, “But why do you have to be so vague all the time? Why can’t you just say what you mean?”
“Because I can’t,” Kat had replied. “I write novels to find out what I think and feel. You’re lucky, because you seem to understand right away things that take me three hundred pages to figure out. But we southerners aren’t noted for our intelligence.”
“Don’t pretend to me that you’ve just fallen off the turnip truck! You’re the one who’s published a dozen books.”
“Creativity isn’t the same thing as intelligence,” Kat had replied.
* * *
—
The next morning, Jessie nodded to Rodney Mullins and his wife as they climbed onto the tour bus. They sat down in the front seat opposite Jessie. Rodney was still limping from his fall off the top deck. As a veteran of the British army, though, he was apparently determined not to miss this daylong tour of El Alamein, to honor the World War II sacrifices of his brothers in battle.
Most cruise guests on the bus were veterans of some war or another, or wives of these veterans. They were the reason why the Amphitrite had docked in Alexandria, despite its having bypassed the other Egyptian ports for being too dangerous. Many had signed on for this cruise precisely because of the stop at El Alamein. To have skipped it would have risked a riot by men who knew how to kill.
Gail Savage, attired in a black silk jumpsuit, with her black scarf corralling her mane of blond hair, boarded the bus. Behind her came a gentleman host named Harry, carrying a black leather Balenciaga tote bag containing a mahogany urn full of Charles’s ashes. And behind Harry stretched a line of Charles’s battleship comrades in their royal blue naval veteran caps, accompanied by their long-suffering wives, who sported Hermès scarves from the onboard boutique, tied in intriguing knots learned in the workshops conducted by Captain Kilgore’s new bride.
Jessie had volunteered to be the ship representative on this trip. Several junior chefs were hosting a barbecue on a beach west of Alexandria. All staff and crew not on duty were invited, and many needed such a relaxing afternoon onshore after the stress of transiting the pirate playground and the Suez Canal with two thousand overwrought passengers. But Jessie felt that since she was the most recent addition to the staff, it was appropriate that she assume this bus duty so that others could go to the barbecue. In addition, both Mona and Ben had continued to change directions or duck through doorways when they saw her coming. She didn’t relish an afternoon of watching them parade around in skimpy bathing suits, Ben prancing like a stallion pursuing a mare in heat.
Amira, the local tour guide, was sitting beside Jessie. She wore what Jessie was coming to recognize as a uniform for young Egyptian women—jeans, a tight T-shirt with long sleeves that covered her wrists, a loose colorfully patterned blouse, and a red head scarf that coordinated with the blouse. She was chatting through a microphone to the passengers in excellent British-accented English, describing the sites they were passing and summarizing the complicated history of Alexandria—from a seaside village of fishermen who worshipped Isis and Osiris, to a Greek city-state founded by Alexander the Great, to a colony of Rome, to a center for Sufi teachings following the expulsion of Muslims from Spain in the fifteenth century, to a watering hole for French and British expatriates. They were passing mile after mile of modern holiday complexes along the coast, as empty as ghost towns. Amira explained that they were occupied for only a couple of months in the summer, when people from Cairo headed north for the cool coastal breezes off the Mediterranean.
Jessie lacked the stamina to listen to Amira. Still shaken by “Swan Song I,” she was trying to convince herself that it was fine if other people had looked at Kat with longing. After all, a few had looked at Jessie with longing, too—and a couple of times she had looked back. And what difference did it make now if either had done more than look?
Kat had had an imperious streak that resisted any attempt to control her. She said it was a result of having grown up a Southern Baptist, surrounded by so many prohibitions that you became determined to thwart them all. She embodied what people meant when they spoke of southern women’s having iron fists inside their velvet gloves. Kat was implacably charming and polite, unless you tried to boss her around. Then she went all John Wayne on you, and her beautiful amber eyes turned to ice.
* * *
—
Jessie stood to one side of the door as the cruise guests climbed down from the bus. She watched Rodney Mullins limp alongside his handbag-clutching wife toward the group assembling around Amira. Gail Savage appeared in the bus doorway, with Harry behind her, toting the leather bag containing her husband’s urn. Jessie held out a hand to help her down. Behind Harry filed Charles’s honor guard of fellow sailors and their wives. They all wore headsets beneath their naval veteran caps that would allow them to hear Amira’s commentary as she conducted them around the various sites.
A rectangular block of stone welcomed them to the cemetery. On it was carved, THEIR NAME LIVETH FOREVERMORE. And beyond it nearly eight thousand white marble headstones stretched out woefully among some spindly olive trees. As they trudged through the sandy soil, inspecting the identical graves, Jessie could hear Charles Savage’s shipmates muttering to one another that 12,000 American soldiers and 100,000 Japanese had died on Okinawa, so why was El Alamein considered such a big deal?
Amira led them toward the museum. Outside it, they circled a garden where half a dozen varieties of tanks painted the color of sand were on display. A damaged Spitfire with twisted propeller blades perched on a concrete platform like a swatted mosquito. The garden resembled an adventure playground for delinquent teenagers. The men inspected the equipment, fascinated, while their wives discussed the new shades of nail polish available at the Canyon Ranch spa on the Amphitrite, where they all profoundly wished they were passing the day.
Inside, display cases featured mannequins in uniforms, wearing medals and carrying equipment and banners, organized by nation. A large sand table illustrated the two battles of El Alamein, using rows of blinking lights to indicate troop movements. Amira steered the group from display to display, explaining Rommel’s and Montgomery’s strategies. Between the two armies, more than 300,000 young men had wandered around a sandy wasteland, wearing only shorts and light sweaters in a place where hoarfrost formed on the jeep hoods at night. Many soldiers on both sides dropped dead from dehydration, hypothermia, and disease, to say nothing of bullets and mortars. Many deserters from both armies got lost trying to flee and simply lay down in the sand to perish. Many tanks and jeeps ran out of fuel and sat buried in sand drifts. Many mines remained unexploded and were still today blowing legs off of unlucky camels.
When they reached a display case covering a facet of the campaign labeled OPERATION MANHOOD, Jessie couldn’t take it anymore. She excused herself to Amira and returned to the bus, where she rested her head against the seat back and felt despair. Whenever the physicians in her family were confronted with hopeless human lunacy, they muttered, “Poor suffering humanity.” Jessie, her son Anthony, and her brothers now did this, as had their father, as had his father and mother before him. It was their family mantra.
What struck Jessie most forcefully about this battlefield was the cleanliness and orderliness, the neat rows of graves so precisely spaced. She was suddenly assailed by memories of her father as he lay in a bed in a nursing home north
of Burlington during his final months.
Day after day, hour after hour, he spoke about war, “his” war, World War II. He had lived in a tent in the snow in northern France with one helmet of coal per day for heat. After contracting pneumonia, he had been sent to the American Hospital near Paris, where he spent every night lying under his bed while German planes roared past overhead. Back at his base, he had climbed down a ladder every morning into a huge pit dug in the ground in order to treat the German prisoners corralled there.
He had met trainloads of wounded and dying Allied soldiers shipped south from the Battle of the Bulge. Later, under a tarp in the Roman ruins of Trier, with a machine gun at his feet, he had operated on starving and diseased POWs liberated from German camps. One evening as he was saving the leg of a German prisoner from amputation, a group of retreating German soldiers broke into the operating tent and sprayed the doctors with bullets. Once they realized that the patient was German, they apologized, thanked the doctors for their humanity, and departed. Her father finished the procedure with bullets in his own legs, as well as a shattered kneecap.
“You were a hero, Dad,” Jessie insisted.
“There was nothing heroic about it,” he maintained with dogged urgency. “We were terrified the whole time. We just wanted to survive, and help each other survive, and get the hell back home. When I die, I don’t want a military funeral. Flags and uniforms and twenty-one-gun salutes—no! It was all blood and feces and mud, rotting corpses and handsome young men with missing limbs, screaming with pain and fear. Confusion and horror and panic. No honor guard for me, Jessie. No taps on a lone bugle from a distant hillside. No folded American flag. No nothing. Please promise me.” She promised him.
Later that week as Jessie was watching Saving Private Ryan with him on TV, he got a terrified look on his face and shouted at her to go find flak jackets and helmets for them both. She tried to reassure him that they were safe in a nursing home in Burlington, but he was convinced they were under attack on Omaha Beach. A few nights later, she was summoned to his bedside in the middle of the night because he had awakened yelling and had hurled the night nurse across the room. He was transferred the next day to the locked ward for dementia patients.
Back at his deserted house, as Jessie cleaned out his closets, she found his beige wool captain’s dress uniform, with many medals and ribbons pinned on its chest. It was as pocked with moth holes as a battlefield with shell craters. He hadn’t put it in a bag to protect it. It appeared he hadn’t even looked at it for seventy years. Yet his wartime experiences had remained vivid and seemed to be increasing in intensity as he approached death.
Standing there in his closet with his moth-ravaged uniform clasped in her arms, Jessie suddenly understood that he had suffered from undiagnosed PTSD for seven decades. He had tried all that time to self-medicate with prescription painkillers, driving the local pharmacists crazy with his schemes to augment his stash. The whole family were physicians, and the symptoms had been right there in front of them. But even her brother Stephen, who had himself been treated for PTSD after his tour in Vietnam, hadn’t recognized their father’s dire condition. They were all so accustomed to his being in charge and taking care of everyone else that it hadn’t occurred to them that he could ever need help. Jessie had been swamped with grief for him—and for his family, who had had to endure his never-ending anxieties and his fruitless attempts to alleviate them with ever-increasing doses of Dilaudid.
Soon after this, her father at last found release from his suffering: The hospice nurses gave him as much morphine as he wanted. He died peacefully, with Jessie and Stephen at his bedside, while Mozart’s clarinet quintet played quietly on Stephen’s iPhone.
The passengers were returning to the bus. Gail Savage got on first, Harry behind her with the tote bag. They sat down in the front seat opposite Jessie, where Rodney Mullins and his wife had been sitting on the trip over. While Jessie was trying to figure out how to inform them that they had just stolen Rodney’s seat, Rodney climbed on the bus. He stood in the aisle and looked down at them, the flexing muscles in his beefy forearms making his snake tattoo writhe as though the snake were alive. “Excuse me, madam,” he said icily, “but I think you’ve taken our seats.”
Gail sighed plaintively and looked up at him through her enormous sunglasses. She removed them, no doubt intending to enchant him with her startling turquoise eyes. “My husband Charles’s ashes are in this bag, and it’s so heavy. We’ve been lugging it around all afternoon, and we’re absolutely exhausted. Do you mind if we just stay here?”
Rodney looked at her with outrage. But he whirled around and limped down the aisle to Gail’s seat in the back, with his wife trotting along behind him, clutching her handbag to her chest as protectively as though it contained the nuclear codes.
* * *
—
A tent had been set up on the quay alongside the Amphitrite. Waiters were serving the guests home from their tours flutes of Veuve Clicquot. As Jessie descended the bus steps, she spotted the young maintenance man in the red bandanna headband carrying a crate of bottles from the ship to the tent. A gangly ginger-haired man in a green polo shirt stood beside the tent, looking expectantly at the bus. Jessie realized it was Rusty Kincaid, the golf pro who had left the ship in Dubai with a wilted erection.
As she held out her hand to help Gail down the steps, the young man’s face broke into a grin. When Gail spotted him, she stumbled and would have fallen if Jessie hadn’t grabbed her arm to steady her. Behind her came Harry with the Balenciaga bag.
Rusty dashed over to Gail and seized her arm from Jessie.
“Where in the world did you come from?” Gail asked irritably.
“The airport! I’m getting back on the ship! I’m as good as new and ready to ride!” He gestured to her scarf and mourning gear. “But what’s happened?”
“My husband, Charles, had a heart attack and died.”
Rusty struggled to assume a somber expression. “No kidding,” he finally said.
“Harry has been kind enough to carry his ashes for me today. We just took Charles to El Alamein.”
Rusty glanced uneasily at Harry. Harry glared back. There was a crashing sound over by the drinks tent. Everyone looked up and saw that a maintenance man in a blue jumpsuit had dropped a crate of champagne bottles. A gasp went up from the crowd, many evidently knowing the price of a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
Gail glanced in the direction of the crash. Her eyes met those of the maintenance man. She flushed while he blanched, as though they were exchanging blood supplies. People stalled behind Gail on the bus started to mutter, eager to get to the champagne before it ran out.
“Will you dine with me tonight?” Rusty asked Gail as the passengers fought their way past her to the waiters whose trays bore the champagne flutes.
“That’s hardly appropriate now that I’m a widow,” she sniffed.
Jessie reflected that this sudden seizure of propriety didn’t really suit her.
“Can I come to your room after dinner, then?” He wriggled his rust-colored eyebrows so that they looked like the woolly bear caterpillars that old-time Vermonters inspected to predict the severity of the upcoming winter.
“I’ve been out all day. I’m going to order room service and go right to sleep.”
“Tomorrow, then?” asked Rusty, his bubbly good spirits starting to go flat.
“We’ll see,” she murmured, heading for the ship.
After the final passenger had exited from the bus, Jessie walked over to the tent and took a champagne flute from a waiter. The maintenance man who had dropped the Veuve Clicquot was carrying out another case. He set it on a table and straightened up, his hands bracing his lower back, a pained expression on his face.
“Spine troubles?” ventured Jessie.
He nodded. “I had a disk operation, but I haven’t felt that grea
t ever since.”
“You shouldn’t be carrying crates of champagne, for one thing.”
He shrugged. “What choice do I have?”
Jessie nodded. “Sorry, it’s your job, isn’t it? I’m Jessie, by the way.” She extended her hand.
He reached out his grimy hand and they shook. “Xander,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.”
“I admired your throwing those tables at the pirates in the Red Sea.”
“You have to fight fire with fire, right?”
“Unless you’re the brand of Christian who believes you should turn the other cheek. But picking up tables is another thing you shouldn’t do, Xander, for the sake of your poor back.”
Xander cast her a winning smile. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll make sure not to throw tables at pirates in the future!”
Jessie smiled back. He was cheeky and good-looking, in a stevedore kind of way. It was clear something was going on between him and Gail Savage. She could see why Gail was attracted to him. But why were women so often drawn to bad boys? Probably they got so sick of being good girls that bad boys represented an escape. Of course many men and some lesbians preferred bad girls, as well. Jessie herself would have dated Mary Magdalene over the Virgin Mary any day.
Chapter 11
The Love Cave
Jessie left her cabin and headed for the top deck. As she passed Gail Savage’s new suite, Harry, the gentleman host, darted from the hallway into the closet where the cleaners stored their supplies. Jessie stood still, waiting for him to realize that he’d walked into a closet and reappear. But he never did. So she continued down the carpeted corridor, spotting Xander at the far end, striding away in his blue jumpsuit, carrying a red toolbox.