by Lisa Alther
She spotted Rodney Mullins in his cowboy boots and hat, walking alongside his handbag-toting wife as they left the ship. If Rodney had been involved in Gail’s having vanished, he had committed the perfect crime. That morning a follow-up memo had been issued by the cruise line announcing that the investigation had been terminated. Gail’s disappearance had been labeled “unexplained.” If not Rodney, then anyone else in that line could have just gotten away with murder.
A ferry bound for the Isle of Wight and two cross-harbor shuttles were weaving an intricate quadrille around a huge container ship that was creeping slowly toward the mouth of the river that led to the English Channel.
She saw Harry, the priest-turned-escort, in the disembarkation line, a flight bag slung over his shoulder. During the interviews with passengers regarding Gail’s disappearance, one of the singles set, disgruntled that Harry hadn’t replaced Gail with herself, had reported his illicit affair with Gail. Harry had proudly acknowledged it. Mitch, the cruise director, had had no choice but to ask him to hand over his gentleman host badge and leave the ship when it docked.
Rusty Kincaid appeared on the exit gangway, his ginger hair scrambled from a sleepless night. He was so heartbroken over Gail’s disappearance that he couldn’t bear to stay on the ship any longer. He was catching a plane to Cincinnati from Heathrow.
It was like the conclusion of a play. All the characters with whom you had been engrossed took their curtain calls and went home to their real lives. You were left knowing that the drama that had strummed at your heartstrings had evaporated like morning dew. Jessie noted that in Kat’s absence, she was the one now mixing the metaphors.
Also in the line was the Australian woman who had accused Gail of stealing her gown. She was flying home to Perth. Jessie wondered if she’d managed to retrieve her dress from Gail’s cabin amid all the chaos.
Amy rushed in to inform Jessie that a maintenance man who had been hanging from ropes to paint the nose of the ship had been injured. They jogged down the central hallway and took the elevator up to the bow. When they got there, Jessie discovered Xander in his paint-splattered blue jumpsuit, lying on a wide board, groaning. He had bitten through his lower lip, and his chin was dripping blood.
She squatted down beside him. “Your back?” she asked.
He nodded, his eyes tightly shut. “I had an unbearable pain down my left leg, and now I can’t feel it at all.”
“We need to get you to a hospital onshore for an MRI.”
“But what will I do if I can’t work? I have a wife and three children in the Philippines.”
“You do?” She had thought he was a freelance Lothario. Who could ever have imagined that he was a family man? “Well, I’m sure the cruise line will take care of you, Xander.”
Xander chuckled bitterly. “What world are you living in, Doc?”
Jessie paged Ben, who had gone ashore with Mona to lunch with some friends of his. He soon paged her back that an ambulance would arrive on the quay. Jessie should bring the EMTs on board. The driver would know where to take Xander.
Back in the clinic after overseeing Xander’s evacuation, Jessie watched through the porthole as Mona and Ben passed through the crew entry door onto the ship. Ben was wearing his whites, and Mona, a turquoise skirted suit and low heels. Mona had been a nomad in service to her talent for a long time now. But her voice wouldn’t last forever, and then what would she do for a living? However, Ben, so much older, with his harem of ex-wives and children, wasn’t a good bet. Mona was hitching her wagon to a falling star.
Besides, they didn’t look like a couple. Or if they did, it was an unhappy one. Mona’s heart definitely wasn’t in it, and Ben had gone through the motions so many times now that he appeared to be on automatic pilot. Jessie would be doing them both a favor if she whisked Mona away from him. But would it be a favor to herself? Probably not. Then she would be as pathetic as Ben, snaring a younger woman so that she could pretend that she, too, was young again. Admittedly, the chemistry was there. She couldn’t deny the tremor that had shaken her arm when Mona had stroked her wrist in the Bay of Biscay, or the pang of desire that had passed between them in the Lisbon fado house. But there were limits to chemistry. And since she was experienced enough to know what those were, she was clearly the one tasked with riding the brakes.
Chapter 15
Metaphors
As the Amphitrite rounded the Isle of Wight and headed toward the English Channel, Jessie sat in the main dining room with Mrs. P., eating a full English breakfast of eggs, sausages, tomatoes, and cold toast with marmalade.
The atmosphere on board had shifted noticeably that morning as they cast off from the Southampton wharf. What had seemed an interminable journey to Jessie back in the Arabian Sea had now ended for well over half the passengers who had witnessed the foiled pirate attack in the Red Sea and the refugee rescue in the Mediterranean. Those people had disembarked the previous day, taking their grief, guilt, indifference, or irritation home with them. The new passengers were mostly Americans who didn’t like to fly, or who wanted to avoid jet lag. They were heading to New York after business or pleasure in London or on the Continent, anointing the weary, battered ship with their brash optimism. Or they were Brits bound for New York’s outlet malls with empty suitcases, also full of good cheer because of the bargains they expected to snag.
“It feels so strange having all those people we traveled with throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East gone now. It’s almost as though it were all a dream,” she observed to Mrs. P.
“You get used to that. People and their dramas come and go on board, just like on dry land, only faster.”
“But the whole mood has shifted, with all these smiling Americans with good dental work.”
“Yes, in spite of the stereotypes about charming English people, it turns out many Americans are actually more polite. They let you go ahead of them into elevators. And if the elevator is full, they wait for the next one, instead of cramming themselves in behind you. It’s fascinating watching the changes as the various nationalities get on and off. For instance, sometimes Chinese passengers wear surgical masks around the ship. To fend off our wicked Western germs, I guess. But is there any chance you might join us full-time here on the Amphitrite?”
Jessie smiled. “It’s definitely an option, and a very appealing one.”
Just then, Mrs. P. started gasping for air. She grabbed her throat as her face turned purple.
“Are you choking?” Jessie felt herself becoming calm and detached as she transitioned into crisis mode.
Mrs. P. nodded frantically.
Jessie stood up and pulled back Mrs. P.’s chair. “I’m going to do the Heimlich on you. You’ll be fine.”
Jessie lifted her to her feet and stood behind her with a fist positioned over her solar plexus. She jerked upward several times. A chunk of sausage came flying from Mrs. P.’s mouth onto the carpet. Mrs. P. fell back into her chair and took a gulp of water.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Let me help you back to your room.”
Mrs. P. got to her feet and walked shakily across the dining room with Jessie holding her arm. The entire restaurant erupted into cheers and applause. Jessie smiled and nodded. She wondered if Mrs. P. realized that the good Lord might have intended for her to choke to death on that sausage she had so greedily inhaled. She would have died if another mortal had not intervened with an artificial medical technique. Yet she expected young women who were unintentionally pregnant to pay for their mistakes their whole lives long.
After leaving Mrs. P. at her room, Jessie went out on the walking deck to watch the ship sail along the Cornish coast toward the open ocean. Emerald green fields topped the rocky cliffs that plunged right down into the waves. This was the same route followed by both the Mayflower and the Titanic, with their drastically different fates.
In a few days the ship would dock in Brooklyn. Mona would disembark there. Ben would proceed to the Caribbean, South America, and the South Pacific. Would Ben and Mona’s romance, or whatever it was, continue?
As for herself, she faced some decisions. She concluded she needed to do a rule-out of her options, as though diagnosing a patient. She sat down in a lounge chair and took a small notebook and pen from her knapsack. She wrote: “(1) Continue on the Amphitrite as a physician. (2) Continue on the ship as a permanent passenger. (3) Stay in New York. (4) Stay in New York with Mona. (5) Return to the Burlington ER. (6) Return to Burl. and retire. (7) Join Doctors Without Borders. (8) Enroll in a retirement community and play golf.”
Studying her list, she crossed out number eight. She wasn’t yet ready for golf. Beyond that, she couldn’t say. She flipped her notebook shut and returned it to her knapsack.
Burlington was a wonderful place, but most people she knew there were coupled. It could be lonely, especially in the winter, when everyone cocooned with loved ones to eat popcorn and binge-watch TV series on Netflix. At least in New York City you could go out at any hour of the day or night and be surrounded by other lonely people.
She smiled sardonically, recalling the last line of the Cavafy poem she had memorized for Kat’s service, about the ultimate goal of the journey to Ithaca:
As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,
you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.
Well, she was damned if she understood what Ithaca meant. Based on what little she’d grasped about poetry under Kat’s tutelage, she supposed Ithaca represented home, the home Odysseus wanted to return to if he could escape from Calypso’s love cave, the home where his wife, Penelope, was waiting for him. Kat and she had had a home. But Kat was no longer waiting there for her return, so that home was no longer a home. She had to make a new home for herself, one not haunted by Kat’s absence from it. This journey was supposed to have reconciled her to Kat’s absence, but instead she was more bereft now than when she had first boarded, in a state of such mind-numbing denial. The possible implications of the three “Swan Song” poems had upset her, maybe even more deeply than she had yet acknowledged. She decided to confide in Kat’s best friend, Louise.
Returning to her cabin, she got out Kat’s journal and typed up the three poems titled “Swan Song.” Then she sent a chatty e-mail to Louise, telling her a bit about the voyage but not responding to the question in Louise’s last e-mail about when she was returning to Burlington. She concluded by telling Louise, “I found some poems in Kat’s final journal. Although I’ve tried to understand them, I have a tin ear for poetry, as you well know. Would you be willing to answer some questions I have about them?”
Louise told her by return e-mail to send the poems along, that she’d be pleased to read them and tell Jessie what she thought, but that she had to teach a class in a few minutes. Also, she wanted to take her time with the new poems, so she’d be back in touch in a day or two.
* * *
—
Jessie looked out the front window of the Naxos Bar at the surging black sea. The walking deck had been closed all day due to high winds off the North Atlantic. Even on the couple of days when the deck had been open, Jessie had had to wear her parka and balaclava, brought from Vermont. The few people out walking had moved quickly, hunched over against the cold. It was quite a shock after the blistering sun in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. No wonder the Islamic invaders of Europe had felt such contempt for the barbarians of the north, who wore smelly animal furs and huddled in their hovels for warmth.
“This is the same route, in reverse, that my father took on the lead ship of a troop convoy during World War Two,” Jessie told Ben, who had invited her for a drink. “He did an appendectomy, using dinner forks as retractors, while his ship sent down depth charges to destroy the German subs beneath them.”
Ben whistled. “They really were the Greatest Generation, weren’t they? He was an impressive man, your father.”
“I forgot that you met him.”
“Yeah, he came to Roosevelt once to visit you. He was a huge man in every respect!”
“Yes, he was a war hero, and he paid for it for the rest of his life. His legs were shattered by a German machine gun, and he eventually became unable to walk even with braces and crutches. After you met him, he got addicted to painkillers. Not long before he died, I realized that he had undiagnosed PTSD.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“I was with him when he had a flashback. We were watching a war movie, and he freaked out and insisted that I race into the corridor of his nursing home to get us some helmets and flak jackets.”
“Yes, it can last a lifetime if it isn’t treated—and sometimes even when it is treated.”
“Fine physicians my brothers and I were, huh, not to have even noticed his suffering?”
“I don’t imagine he made it easy for anyone to help him.”
Jessie shook her head. “No one except my mother. He wore her out with his demands for help.”
“Well, the reason I asked you here tonight is because I wanted to thank you for doing such a fantastic job on short notice these past six weeks. And I wanted to invite you to renew your contract. You’re very skilled and very conscientious, and we’d be thrilled if you’d continue with us to Sydney. On a personal note, I’ve enjoyed having you on board. We work well together, and I have complete confidence in your abilities.”
“Thank you, Ben. I’ve enjoyed it, too. Your offer is tempting, but I’m not sure what I want to do next. Can I give you an answer in the morning?”
“I had hoped you’d say yes right away. But tomorrow morning will be fine. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
Back at her cabin, Jessie discovered an e-mail from Louise, saying that she’d read “Swan Song”: “Its lyricism is almost old-fashioned. I guess Kat reverted to her southern roots at the end of her life. Thank you for letting me read it. I was quite moved. What questions do you have? I don’t want to put words into Kat’s mouth, but I’ll do my best to answer them.”
Jessie took a deep breath and then asked Louise if it was possible that Kat had been in love with someone else when she wrote the “Swan Song” poems.
Louise answered immediately: “No, Jess. After she met you, that was it for her. The three parts of ‘Swan Song’ comprise one poem, and it isn’t about you and her, or about her and anybody else. It’s a composite of all her loves—and of her love of life, most of all. More than that, it’s her confrontation with her own death. In mythology, a swan is supposedly silent its entire life, but then it sings an eerily beautiful melody as it lies dying. You know how Kat loved music, and this is her final song. Let me know if you have other questions, but please never doubt the love that you and Kat shared.”
Jessie lay back on her pillows and pondered this answer. She felt tears begin to well up. She hadn’t cried in years, but here on the Amphitrite she’d been crying every other week. However, she didn’t want Mona to come comfort her again. So she sat up and dried her eyes with her sheet. But how was she to know if Louise was telling the truth? Louise was Kat’s best friend. If Kat had had a new love, Louise wouldn’t tell Jessie, out of loyalty to Kat, and from not wanting to hurt Jessie. What if Louise herself had been the new love?
Jessie hurled Kat’s journal across the room. It hit the wall and slid down it to the floor. As she looked at the crumpled heap in the corner, she had to confess that she had definitely lost her fabled capacity for detachment.
After struggling for some time to calm herself, Jessie realized that her therapist of long ago would have pointed out that she had been projecting. Every fiber of Jessie’s body knew that there had been no one else for Kat. Jessie had made the whole thing up because Kat’s having been unfaithful to her would have made it easier to let her go. But
the reality was that Jessie had been toying with the idea of getting involved with Mona. Jessie was the one who had had her eye on someone else, not Kat.
The intercom clicked overhead. Captain Kilgore’s voice came on: “Just to let you know that we’re now passing over the spot where the Titanic struck an iceberg that fateful night in April of 1912, just a little over one hundred years ago. The remains of the Titanic now lie below us on the ocean floor. But hey, no worries, folks, I’m in charge now!”
Jessie felt a twinge of panic remembering his nearly sinking the cargo ship in the Bay of Biscay. He was the age of her son, Anthony, and he used language like “No worries.” This was not reassuring. But she had other topics to fret about, so she took a melatonin and turned out her light.
* * *
—
When Jessie awoke, a pale northern sun was peeking out from behind some storm clouds the color of fresh bruises. She reached over to her bedside table for her post-cruise options list. She had apparently reached some decisions during melatonin-fueled dreams that she couldn’t recall. She crossed off numbers one and two. She had had enough of the Amphitrite. It had originally seemed like a floating palace. But her cabin now felt as confining as one of the dog kennels on the top deck. It was a luxurious kennel, true, but it had become claustrophobic.
She also crossed out option number five. Medicine no longer appealed to her now that insurance companies were telling doctors how much time to spend with patients—when every decent doctor knew that healing involved time and attention at least as much as it did tests and medications. Her father had quit medicine when faced with having to learn laparoscopic techniques. She was quitting because she knew she couldn’t help anyone in the fifteen minutes insurance companies were now allotting doctors. In addition, although her professional detachment had been failing her recently, she wasn’t sure she missed it. Her raw emotions weren’t always pleasant to experience, but they did make her feel like a full-fledged member of the human race.