by Lisa Alther
An enormous cheer went up as the passengers leapt to their feet to snap photos of the two giant ships that had just materialized alongside the Amphitrite. The orchestra launched into “God Save the Queen.” The British women pulled their miniature Union Jacks on sticks from their handbags. The sky filled with out-of-sync voices as the passengers on all three ships pleaded with God to protect their monarch from the knavish Scots.
While the scarlet sun plunged into the vast black waters of the Atlantic, the several thousand passengers on all three ships worked themselves up into a frenzy of patriotism with back-to-back renditions of “Land of Hope and Glory,” “Jerusalem,” and the inevitable “Rule, Britannia!” The sky turned midnight blue, and stars flickered on overhead, as though reflecting the hundreds of twinkling lights on the neighboring ships.
Eventually, the exhausted cowpokes fell silent and wandered off to their cabins in pursuit of the foil-wrapped Godivas their stewards had placed on their pillows.
Chapter 13
Fish Food
Jessie woke up to the sound of a female voice with an Indian accent over the intercom, urging Mrs. Gail Savage to report immediately to the purser’s desk. What is that woman up to now? Jessie wondered blearily as she turned over and tried to go back to sleep. But a few minutes later the same woman’s voice repeated this message, sounding harried. It was time for Jessie to go run the morning clinic anyway, so she rolled out of bed and donned a fresh white shirt and knife-creased slacks from a constantly renewed supply provided by her overworked cabin steward.
Upon reaching the officers’ dining room, she realized that the ship seemed to be scarcely moving. “What’s going on?” she asked Stan, the lab tech, who was eating oatmeal with blueberries at one of the tables.
“Apparently a passenger has gone missing.”
“Who? Mrs. Savage?”
“Yeah, I think that’s her name.”
“When?”
“That’s what they’re trying to figure out. They’re reviewing the CCTV footage from last night, and they’re searching the ship. Meanwhile, the clinic is closed because the passengers have been confined to their cabins until the search is completed. So you can go back to bed.”
Jessie plopped down in a chair opposite Stan. “I can’t believe it. Mrs. Savage did an amazing tango on the top deck last night. Did you see it?”
Stan shook his head. “I skipped the barbecue. Don’t tell Ben. I just wasn’t in the mood.”
“Amy trouble?” guessed Jessie.
“Yeah, I suppose she’s just not that into me.”
Jessie knew that it wasn’t that Amy wasn’t into Stan. It was, rather, that she was into Ben, with whom she flirted relentlessly in the clinic all day long. But it wouldn’t help Stan to know this, so she said instead, “It’s hard on a ship, isn’t it? You can’t get away from people. You keep bumping into them. It’s like ripping the scab off a wound time after time.”
“You said it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
“How did they know that Mrs. Savage was missing?”
“She was supposed to meet some guy for breakfast. When she didn’t turn up, he went to her cabin, but she didn’t answer the door. He had the purser page her, but she never showed up. The purser got her steward to open her door. She hadn’t slept in her bed, and the chocolate from last night was still on her pillow.”
“Is there anything we’re supposed to be doing to help find her?”
“Not that I know of. Just staying out of the way.”
“If you hear anything else, will you page me?”
“Sure thing.”
Jessie grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee and returned to her cabin. She changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants and climbed back into bed. Sipping the coffee, she opened Kat’s journal and flipped to the next unread page. On it Kat had pasted a printout of an e-mail exchange with her agent, who told her that mid-list literary fiction such as she wrote wasn’t selling well anymore. She suggested that Kat write a memoir. But if she insisted on writing another novel, its main character needed to be a vampire or a serial killer, preferably both.
Kat had responded that she couldn’t write a memoir because she had had a happy childhood. Who wanted to read about someone who just went to school, came home, did her homework, baby-sat her siblings, set the table for supper, and then went to choir practice?
Then she had written out a recipe by Gordon Ramsay for shepherd’s pie, her favorite.
Below that she had copied another Cavafy poem, this one featuring two lovers who were upset because they had to part. But Cavafy speculated that it was just as well because that way their love could remain intact and not be eroded by the passage of time.
Was Kat’s interest in this poem an attempt to put a positive spin on her own death? Jesse wondered. It was a good thing she was dying, because she and Jessie would never have to face the death of their desire for each other? This sounded like a rationale that Kat, always the stoic, would cook up.
Next Kat had written several drafts of a new poem, as though in response to the Cavafy poem, with lots of words crossed out or shifted around. The final draft was titled “Swan Song II”:
I know the time must come, sweetheart,
When you and I won’t be attuned—
Photos in your memory book,
Borrowed shirts that weren’t returned.
My finger will forget the code
I punch to dial you on the phone.
My hands won’t remember how
To stroke you so you moan out loud.
But let’s pretend our current bliss
Will never start to feel banal,
And let’s agree to face its death
Like warriors who have dared it all.
Jessie laid the journal down on the bed. Had Kat been growing tired of her? Jessie had always regarded their love as something fixed, the Greenwich mean time of her emotional life. Had Kat already had one foot out the door when she became ill?
This was unbearable, Jessie reflected. Why was she doing this to herself—and to Kat? It made no sense. They had been devoted to each other for twenty years. Why was she allowing herself to question the integrity of their relationship? Was she mad at Kat for leaving her? Might this be her response to Kat’s having turned away from her on her deathbed?
Jessie jumped up and again pulled on her white trousers and shirt. Grabbing Kat’s journal off the bed, she headed for the walking deck. She would find a spot from which to hurl this wretched journal into the ocean, thereby setting herself free from the insane doubts it was generating in her. Striding along, she spotted Major Thapa in his whites, looking through high-powered binoculars from behind the starboard railing.
When she reached him, she called, “Good morning, Major Thapa!”
He lowered his binoculars. “Hello there, Doctor.”
“Any luck?”
“It’s hopeless,” he admitted. “Mrs. Savage isn’t anywhere on the CCTV footage, and she’s nowhere to be found on this ship. We have no idea if she went overboard at all, much less when or where or why. We’ve turned around to retrace our route. The Portuguese coast guard is launching a helicopter and a rescue vessel, and the Spanish navy has sent up a surveillance plane to monitor their coastline. But we’re just going through the motions. We don’t even know where to begin to look.”
“Since her husband died, she’s been spending a lot of time with a gentleman host named Harry, and with a crew member named Xander, and also with a passenger named Rusty Kincaid.”
“Busy lady. It was Harry who reported her missing. She was supposed to meet him for breakfast. He said he hadn’t seen her since last night, in the bow after the concert. We’ll have to talk with the other two.”
“She seemed pretty despondent over her h
usband’s death. I wonder if she decided to jump.”
“That seems the most likely scenario. It happens a lot, you know.”
“I’m sure. Can you imagine a more romantic way to end your life than to leap from a cruise ship off some foreign coast?”
“It’s certainly a lot less messy for your survivors than hanging or shooting yourself. Even if you overdose, your family still has to deal with your body.”
“Did Mrs. Savage leave a note?”
“No. We searched her cabin and didn’t find a thing, except for her clothes and toiletries.”
“What about that urn containing her husband’s ashes that she’s been carrying around since Alexandria?”
“No sign of that, either.”
“So she and her urn have both vanished?”
“So it would seem.”
Jessie kept walking until she came to the nook where the extra propellers were stored. Past them was a railing that looked directly onto the ocean. If she threw the journal over the side at that spot, it would land in the water and not on some passenger’s balcony.
She studied the composition book with its mottled cover of black and white. Kat had written in it many times during her final months. If Jessie disposed of it now, she would be losing her final link to Kat. She would also forfeit her chance to figure out what Kat had been preparing to write next, as well as what she had been thinking and feeling as she had struggled to come to terms with her own death. By tossing the journal overboard, Jessie realized that she would be refusing an opportunity to learn more about this woman with whom she had shared her life for two decades. She could continue to live with her illusions, or she could face the truth, however painful. On the other hand, the journal might eventually offer some consolation.
She plopped down in a deck chair in the sun, holding tightly to the journal she had almost jettisoned. Meanwhile, in the distance she could see one of the sister ships trolling slowly back and forth, searching its assigned grid for Gail Savage. Actually, by now, they would be searching for Gail Savage’s corpse. She could never have survived for this long in the chilly waters of the Atlantic. Overhead a search helicopter flapped past, while Zodiacs fanned out from the Amphitrite in all directions.
* * *
—
Jessie was sitting in the lounge of the Naxos Bar, sipping a latte while the Amphitrite followed a fiery pathway up the Tagus River that was reflecting the rising sun. The unsuccessful search for Gail Savage had been called off at sunset the previous evening, and the three sister ships had resumed their voyage to Lisbon. The Amphitrite had just passed on the port side at the river’s mouth a sixteenth-century fortified tower of pale limestone, with Moorish cupolas. Now it was approaching a modern monument of concrete that featured the prow of a caravel packed with statues of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers, navigators, and missionaries who had sailed all over the globe during Portugal’s famous Golden Age of Discovery.
Jessie was feeling sad about the disappearance of Gail Savage. Gail had possessed a kind of dark energy that Jessie had enjoyed. Maybe Gail was her alter ego—Morgan le Fay to her own Florence Nightingale? Gail was a woman who had done as she pleased, without regard for what other people might want from her. Of course the path between narcissism and martyrdom was a narrow one, fraught with peril. Kat used to describe a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress of gender stereotypes in which men plunged off the Cliff of Narcissism, while women floundered in the Slough of Martyrdom.
This trap had ensnared Jessie’s own parents. When former patients had spotted her father around town, they had practically genuflected. Meanwhile, her mother, Phi Beta Kappa and Homecoming Queen at her university, had served as a disgruntled cheerleader for him, taking her revenge via many small passive-aggressive ploys that left him miserable and searching for more Dilaudid.
But Jessie had always been drawn to women like her grandmother, who had served as a surgeon in World War I and had marched in the suffrage parades afterward—women who refused to be passive servants and victims, women who didn’t shelter behind the achievements of powerful men. She had had such a mentor at Roosevelt Hospital. Dr. Isaacs had managed to look stylish even in her lab coat, with her wavy champagne-colored hair and her warm hazel eyes. She had owned stethoscopes in several different colors, and the one she wore always matched either her eyeglass frames or her nail polish.
When Jessie was looking for a job after her residency and discovered that Ben was being offered higher salaries for the same positions, she had complained to Dr. Isaacs in her office on West Fifty-ninth Street. Dr. Isaacs had replied, “Just keep your head down, Jessie, and do twice the work for twenty-five percent less money. Do most of the housework and child care at home. Deal cheerfully with men who have so many advantages they’re not even aware of—but who feel threatened by your very existence. And hope that karma functions somewhere in the universe. Or else find yourself a good woman. But not me. I’m taken.” Jessie had been shocked by the implication that she appeared to Dr. Isaacs to have the potential to be with a woman. But apparently mother cats could spot their own litters.
Jessie’s mother had often expressed dislike of Dr. Isaacs, along with Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King. But to have embraced her mother’s version of femininity would have felt to Jessie like a death sentence. And it had, in fact, turned into one for her mother. Her father could no longer walk because of his war wounds and was addicted to painkillers. Because of his medical knowledge, each of his moles became a melanoma, and every bout of indigestion was a heart attack. Nevertheless, he insisted upon remaining at home, firing all caregivers who weren’t his wife, even though she had a heart condition and was perhaps more ill than he. When Jessie tried to intervene in this sadomasochistic tarantella, her parents had joined forces to tell her to mind her own business. Her mother had died from a heart attack brought on by the exhaustion of dealing with her husband’s extravagant demands and lamentations twenty-four hours a day.
But Gail Savage had perhaps overdone her determination to evade the Slough of Martyrdom. What had actually happened to her? Jessie wondered. Accident, suicide, or foul play? There was no evidence she had fallen overboard, but the entire ship had been searched, without her being found. Jessie reviewed the various areas she had toured when first boarding the Amphitrite in Hong Kong. She kept returning in her mind to a room that held the anchor and its chain. The giant iron anchor hung right above a shaft that opened directly onto the sea. If someone fell or jumped or was pushed down that shaft, he or she would be run over by the ship and ground to bits by the propellers. The other room that came vividly to mind contained a giant garbage compactor. Food wastes from the kitchens were pulverized in it and released into the ocean as a slurry the crew referred to as “fish food.” These were grisly scenarios, but somehow or other Gail Savage had disappeared into thin air—or, more likely, into salt water.
Straight ahead of the ship was a huge suspension bridge painted the same glowing rust red as the Golden Gate Bridge. On the south side of the river just beyond it was a tall white column on which perched a statue of a man in a flowing robe—Jesus, presumably. His arms were outstretched, as though he were about to take a swan dive into the Tagus. Upriver Jessie could see some of Lisbon’s famous hills, dotted with whitewashed houses sporting red-tile roofs. Atop one hill was a Moorish castle with a long crenellated wall.
Jessie returned to her analysis of Gail’s death. An accident: She might have downed too much Veuve Clicquot and toppled over a railing. Suicide: She appeared genuinely despondent over her husband’s death. But she certainly hadn’t seemed despairing when she and Harry had performed their remarkable tango the night she vanished. In fact, although Gail and she were both recent widows, Jessie had been astonished by the pace at which Gail had been able to plunge back into the swim, while Jessie herself still hovered on the bank, paralyzed by grief.
Who on board would
have wanted to harm Gail? Well, truth be told, there were several: the Australian woman who claimed Gail had stolen her gown and scorched her arm. Rodney Mullins, whose bus seat she had confiscated at El Alamein, and on whom she had toppled a Jack Daniel’s after her tango. One of the men with whom she had been playing dominatrix might have recovered from his submission and turned on her to avenge his humiliation.
The ship was now creeping past Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio, the Commercial Square, a vast rectangular plaza with an equestrian statue in the middle. Lining it on three sides were rows of commercial and governmental offices involved in Portugal’s maritime trade. These offices, painted golden yellow, had first-floor galleries opening onto the square. On the river side, this square ran down to a wharf. For three centuries it had hosted a slave market, from which nearly six million Africans had been exported to the Americas. Like many other world-class ports, Lisbon’s splendor had been founded on other people’s misery.
Slowly the huge ship approached a dock at the foot of a hill, up which ran a network of twisting streets lined with the red-roofed, whitewashed houses. A crowd of official-looking men in suits and ties was waiting on the quay. Once the mooring lines had been secured, Captain Kilgore, accompanied by James Yancey, Major Thapa, and Ben, all clad in their dress uniforms, disembarked to speak with this welcoming committee. The passengers had been instructed to remain in their cabins. Many were grumbling because the stay in Lisbon was short. But the disappearance of Gail Savage clearly took precedence over their sightseeing.