Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  The men on the quay were not happy, either. Their faces were turning red, and they were gesticulating wildly. Finally, several men in hooded white jumpsuits, who resembled a warren of earless, tailless Easter bunnies, boarded the ship.

  Jessie left the lounge and walked up to the eleventh deck. Reaching Gail’s suite, she discovered that the doorway was plastered with yellow crime-scene tape. Within, the people in the white jumpsuits, who had now donned blue gloves and booties and white surgical masks, were swarming the room, no doubt collecting fingerprints and DNA, just like on CSI.

  Captain Kilgore came on the intercom and read a list of passengers and crew who were required to report to the purser’s desk immediately. The other guests were free to depart on their tours.

  Jessie took an elevator down to the clinic. Ben was now on duty at the front desk, but there were no patients, since most guests had left to explore Lisbon and its environs.

  “So what’s going on?” she asked him.

  He laughed. “It turned into a regular no-man’s-land out there! An FBI agent came with the American consul and an official from the State Department because Mrs. Savage was American. A Scotland Yard agent came with the British consul because the company that owns the cruise line is British. The disappearance occurred off the coast of Portugal, so the Portuguese coast guard sent a representative. We’re docked in Lisbon, so the local police chief came. The Amphitrite is registered in the Bahamas, so a lawyer for the Bahamas Maritime Authority turned up. And the cruise line itself sent a couple of lawyers. Now they’re all arguing among themselves over who has jurisdiction. Their goal is, of course, to cover their own asses if someone decides to sue.”

  “What’s with the list of people Captain Kilgore read out?”

  “They all had some kind of connection to Mrs. Savage. Various authorities are going to interview them. But it’s really just a wild-goose chase.”

  * * *

  —

  As night fell, most of the clinic staff, as well as Harry and his bevy of single women guests, wound through an alley paved with black-and-white mosaics to arrive at the fado house. Its façade was faced with yellow-green-and-white tiles. Within were simple wooden tables and chairs, many already occupied by tour groups from competing cruise ships. Jessie, Ben and Mona, and Amy and Stan sat down at one table, with Harry and five wistful cougars at another. They all ordered Portuguese wines and seafood stews involving cod or sardines.

  While they were eating, a woman in crimson lipstick, wearing a black dress and shawl, came out in the company of two men in suit jackets and fedoras, one carrying a twelve-string Portuguese guitar resembling a lute, and the other a regular acoustic guitar. All the diners laid down their silverware, as instructed by their waiters, so that no clattering utensils would detract from the intensity of the singing. The men began to strum and pick in a minor key.

  Eventually, the woman pulled herself together and launched into one of the most mournful songs Jessie had ever heard. Although she couldn’t understand the Portuguese lyrics, the melody itself conveyed a message of utter devastation. The fado songs had been composed by Portuguese sailors far from home, pining for distant loved ones.

  Jessie glanced at Harry at the next table. His aging face beneath his thinning hair was sagging with grief. He had lost his love. But he wasn’t supposed to have had a love while hosting on the ship. If it became known that he had romanced Gail, he would be banished from the ship. So he had been flirting listlessly all day long with the single women from the piano lounge, each of whom now believed herself to be his new favorite.

  When Jessie returned her eyes to her own table, she discovered Mona gazing at her with what appeared to be longing. Jessie locked eyes with her for a long moment and felt a surge of desire. She had to admit that fado packed a punch. It was to the Portuguese what opera was to Italians, what chansons were to the French. Kat would have loved it.

  As the woman’s wrenching lament continued, whatever its plot may have been, the emotional pitch in the room rose, until the entire place was awash with thwarted passion. Jessie looked around at her tablemates. This was the perfect crowd for fado: Stan yearned for Amy, who yearned for Ben, who yearned for Mona, who yearned for Jessie, who yearned for Kat, who was dead. And at the neighboring table, all five women yearned for Harry, who yearned for Gail, who was also presumably dead.

  By the end of the evening of these agonizing songs about the heartbreak of foiled love, everyone from the Amphitrite was mired in despair. They trudged in gloomy silence back down twisting alleyways of white cobblestones under a jaundice-yellow full moon, each in mourning for some unattainable beloved, like a troupe of suicidal troubadours.

  Back in her cabin, Jessie discovered a new slew of downloaded e-mails from friends and family, all wanting to know where she was and when she was coming back. There were photos of grandchildren in soccer uniforms and tennis outfits, as well as attachments of crayon drawings and report cards and term papers. It appeared she was still being regarded as a matriarch, whether she wanted to be one or not.

  Chapter 14

  The Valley of Death

  Jessie was sitting at lunch in the officers’ dining room with Ben, Major Thapa, and James Yancey, listening to Captain Kilgore tell about his first assignment as a captain—sailing a cargo ship full of new Toyota pickup trucks bound for Egypt southward across the Bay of Biscay.

  “This bay is really deadly,” he was explaining, “because the swells funneling into it from the Atlantic collide with the shallow waters atop the continental shelf. Those shallows are warm because of the Gulf Stream, so their mergence with the cold Atlantic water produces fog and violent gusts.”

  Jessie looked out the window beside her, where the Bay of Biscay was indeed raging. The Amphitrite had side stabilizers, so its lateral rolling was limited. But the bow was bucking the twenty-foot swells like a bronco with a burr beneath its saddle. Waves had been breaking over the prow all morning, and the water in the swimming pools had been sloshing across the decks. Although the purser had been handing out seasickness tablets as if to trick-or-treaters on Halloween, most passengers were in their cabins, throwing up.

  Jessie had been spared this by some pressure-point wristbands Mona had brought to her cabin door early that morning. Headed for a rehearsal at the theater, she had posed in Jessie’s doorway, clad in rainbow-striped workout tights, leg warmers, and a tight cropped T-shirt that left little to Jessie’s imagination.

  “Can you rehearse with the ship lurching around like this?” Jessie had asked.

  “The songs, yes. But probably not the dance steps.”

  Mona held out some gray fabric wristbands. “You should try these. They really work for some people.” She slipped the bands onto Jessie’s wrists. As she carefully positioned the plastic nub on the pressure point of Jessie’s right wrist, Jessie’s arm trembled. Their eyes met.

  “Gotta go,” said Mona softly.

  “Yes, you do.” Smiling faintly, Jessie watched Mona lope down the long hallway. What the hell was that?

  “A gale-force wind came up,” Captain Kilgore was saying. “I panicked and cut back the power by mistake. We were supposed to be riding the waves head-on, but we got turned around so they were hitting us sideways. The waves and the gusts tipped us, until the Toyotas shifted in the hold. The ship started listing to starboard.”

  “Yikes!” said James Yancey. “So what did you do?”

  “Luckily, we were able to fire up the engine and get turned back around, facing into the waves. Then we radioed A Coruña on the Galician coast. A tugboat came out and towed us very slowly back to their harbor. We restowed the trucks and headed toward the Strait of Gibraltar in calmer seas the next day. But I still cringe every time I think about it. It’s a wonder all those new Toyotas didn’t end up at the bottom of this bay, along with the thousands of ships that have gone down here over the centuries.”r />
  Jessie glanced out the window again—and spotted a pale wave the height of the White Cliffs of Dover moving inexorably toward them. She pointed at it, but words of warning wouldn’t come out of her mouth. They all turned and watched helplessly as the huge wall of water smacked the side of the Amphitrite, hurling plates, silverware, and wine bottles across the room. Jessie’s chair skidded along the floor for several feet, and James was thrown onto the tiles.

  Once the ship had steadied itself and James had regained his seat, the five just looked at one another.

  Captain Kilgore said, “See what I mean? You don’t mess with the Bay of Biscay. This is why the ancients put those signs on the Pillars of Hercules, warning sailors not to venture out here from the Mediterranean. The Germans called this bay ‘the Valley of Death’ because so many U-boats sank here.”

  “Any more developments around Gail Savage’s disappearance?” asked Jessie.

  Captain Kilgore shook his head. “Forgive me if this sounds churlish to the Americans present, but it’s no surprise to us that Mrs. Savage was American. Your nation seems to export violence, with your warmongering leaders and your home arsenals of firearms.”

  Ben smiled sourly and replied, “Yes, but without our guns and our gift for violence, we would never have escaped from the British Empire.”

  Everyone laughed, and then the group broke up and headed for the door.

  Out in the hallway, Ben said to Jessie, “Amy is minding the clinic this afternoon. Nobody will show up there anyhow, because they’re all busy throwing up. But tomorrow it will be packed with dehydrated seniors, so go rest up.”

  Jessie took the elevator up to her deck and lurched along the hallway to her cabin. Once inside, she replaced her uniform with her sweatpants and T-shirt and lay down on the bed with some memos from the mailbox outside her door. Through her window she spotted the Galateia, also en route to Southampton, laboring through the heavy swells. Watching the sister ship pitch and heave, she realized the Amphitrite must be doing the same. Fortunately, she had her magic wristbands.

  She wished she could just take Mona to bed and put her out of her misery. She would definitely do it once if she knew that Mona would then snap out of it—but usually if you made love to someone once, he or she expected it to continue. She did have to confess, though, to having poured gasoline on the sparks by admitting to Mona that she loved her. But it was the truth—if love meant wanting to be near Mona, wanting to hear her celestial singing voice, wanting to rest her eyes on Mona’s alluring physique.

  But did acknowledging love mean that two people then had to give each other orgasms and spend the rest of their lives together? Couldn’t love just exist as an incorporeal enhancement to busy lives, adding a sparkle to the eye, a spring to the step, a surge of pleasure to the day, and a lift to weary spirits? But apparently courtly love wasn’t permitted in the modern world. You had to put out or shut up.

  She picked up a memo the cruise line had distributed to the mailboxes of all the passengers and crew concerning Gail Savage’s disappearance. It included a phone number to call should any detail concerning Mrs. Savage, however trivial, occur to them after the ship’s departure from Lisbon. No passengers had been detained, and the ship had been allowed to resume its posted schedule. The notice added that if additional statements were required, guests would be contacted while still on board, or once back at their home bases.

  Jessie wondered if she ought to mention Rodney Mullins’s bizarre interactions with Gail. He had seemed so inordinately annoyed when she had stolen his seat on the El Alamein bus, and when she had swept that drink into his lap. But surely neither of those annoyances constituted a motive for murder. And just because a man had a tattoo of a rattlesnake winding up his forearm was no reason to assume that he was homicidal. But the fact remained that it was possible an unidentified killer was roaming the ship at that very moment. It was also possible he or she might strike again. And if Jessie said nothing about what she had witnessed, she would be partially responsible. But it would be irresponsible to implicate an innocent man without any evidence. She closed her eyes and tried to figure out where her moral duty lay.

  She reached over to the bedside table for the journal she had nearly flung overboard. Opening it, she flipped through the pages until she came to an as-yet-unread one on which Kat had written, “It is truly offensive that the heterosexual world is now forgiving homosexuals for being gay because we’re supposedly ‘born that way.’ I had boyfriends and a husband, but I now choose to love a woman. Any woman in her right mind would choose the same if she looked with clear eyes at what men have done to women over the centuries. How many Jews chose to marry Nazis? It’s insulting for heterosexuals to assume that if lesbians could choose, they would choose men. I can choose, and I choose a woman.”

  Jessie smiled. This sounded so much like Kat. She had always had a chip on her shoulder—as a southerner in the North, as a woman in a misogynistic world, as a lesbian in a homophobic world. She had gotten her training early from her Freedom Rider father, and on her commune, making the giant satirical puppets they had paraded in anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. Later, Kat had seized every opportunity to ride buses overnight to Washington, D.C., to march for gay rights or abortion or peace, or against racism and poverty. Sometimes she had persuaded Jessie to go with her and serve as a volunteer medic. Jessie had marched proudly down Pennsylvania Avenue several times, knowing her suffragist grandmother had walked the same route. Kat had also attended many counterprotests against the right-to-lifers who were constantly trying to block access to the Burlington abortion clinic. She had always insisted that if you were a mouse being batted around by a cat, you needed to rise up on your hind legs and defy the cat—prior to the cat’s final, killing swat.

  Jessie was pleased to know that Kat had been aware of having chosen to be with her, just as she had chosen to be with Kat. Each of them could have led an easier life with a man, but the hassles and penalties of being labeled lesbian had evidently seemed worth it to them both. This entry made her glad she had not consigned this annoying journal to the waves.

  Below this were drafts of a new poem, with the usual deletions and insertions. The finished poem was titled “Swan Song III.” Certainly no one could accuse Kat of originality when it came to her titles:

  I will soon be leaving

  This place where poppies bloom

  In rose and ocher soil

  By rocks from the dark side of the moon.

  I plucked wildflowers in that field

  That was spiked with asphodel.

  I clutched them tight while you just smiled

  And said they’d wilt by night.

  Of course I know that blossoms fade

  And autumn storms must rage,

  But I had hoped two birds in flight

  Could soar above a plague.

  I’ll try to erase that shadowy room

  By the river that drifts to the sea,

  And the chasm that gaped between us

  When you turned your back to me.

  I’ll press this poppy in my book,

  And think some wishful thoughts,

  And hope they help me to forget

  What might have been—but is not.

  So what was this about, then? If Kat had had an affair, it had apparently ended. But when had she had time for all this drama? She hadn’t. She had been dying. This romance had never happened. It had been all in Kat’s imagination—and now it was all in Jessie’s imagination. The only back-turning that had gone on was when Kat had turned away from Jessie in the hospital.

  One of Kat’s most annoying traits had been her illogicality. She had flitted from topic to seemingly unrelated topic like a bee in a patch of borage. Sometimes Jessie would explain to her what she was actually trying to say. Kat would get a hunted look in her eyes and say, “
Please stop telling me what I mean, Jessie. You do your life, and I’ll do mine.”

  Jessie was so exhausted from trying to figure out her elusive lover that she turned over and went to sleep, the heaving of the ship as it struggled through the swells rocking her like a baby in a cradle.

  When she awoke from her nap, the sun was low in the western sky. The ocean surface had turned as smooth as that of Lake Champlain during a placid summer dawn. She got dressed and went looking for Major Thapa, finding him in the officers’ lounge, sipping an espresso. She sat down beside him in an armchair and told him about Gail Savage’s having pilfered Rodney Mullins’s bus seat at El Alamein and having spilled a drink on him after her tango—and about Rodney’s apparent rage.

  Major Thapa shrugged. “Well, thank you, Doctor, but I’m afraid facial expressions don’t count as evidence.”

  “I understand. But the memo from the authorities said to report any detail, however trivial.”

  “I do appreciate it and will pass this information along. But all the competing authorities have finally agreed to label it an unexplained disappearance. Frankly, we have no clue what happened to Mrs. Savage. And unless her family makes a stink, nothing more will be done.”

  “Does she have a family?”

  “None that we’ve been able to locate. No children, no living parents. Only a couple of stepchildren from whom she was estranged.”

  * * *

  —

  Through her office porthole Jessie watched the steady stream of passengers disembarking from the ship to enter the arrivals terminal at the Southampton harbor. Beyond the docks were the mostly modern structures of the city, fronted by an IKEA showroom. The Luftwaffe had bombed Southampton to smithereens during World War II. Little of the ancient city had survived, apart from long stretches of the city walls. Allied soldiers had trained in the rubble for D-day, which had been launched from the ravaged docks.