One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  “So-so.”

  We watched the rest of the news, which ended with a bulletin saying the four missing passengers from the Barca D’Amore had been safely rescued.

  “Thank God!” my mother said.

  It was time for dinner. My mother was so relieved that I hadn’t died on the Barca D’Amore that she forgot all about the way I’d been smiling over that news report.

  I was smiling over the memory of a passenger named Sharon Sherman.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The offer had come up suddenly. The Barca D’Amore out of Los Angeles Harbor needed a piano man when the regular player suffered an appendicitis attack the night before the launch. Seven days and six nights at $200 per night, plus cabin and meals.

  I grabbed the job, unaware that I would also be expected to do a great deal of glad-handing as well as prize-giving for the Ping-Pong and shuffleboard tournaments. They get you on deals like this, one-more-thinging you to death after the ship leaves the dock. They know it’s tough to walk out on a job when you’re a few miles out at sea.

  It was what they call a “cruise to nowhere,” meaning we’d stop for food and fuel but wouldn’t be docking anywhere overnight. Most of the people on board were older than me by ten or fifteen years, and it wasn’t until we were at sea a day or two that I noticed something weird.

  There were no children on board. Kids were not allowed. This really was the Love Boat, a trip on which romances were rekindled, old promises renewed. There was a lot of hand holding, a lot of nose-to-nose conversations, and presumably a lot of Viagra-fueled midday humping.

  What better sound track for such a sappy excursion than the piano-pounder who sang “Sweet Days”?

  I played it twice a day—once at the early show, then again at the later one. The rest of my repertoire included songs by the Carpenters, Captain & Tennille, The Commodores…love songs, nothing but love songs, one more dreadful than the next.

  It was what was known in the business as an Insulin Set. You needed an injection of the stuff at the end of the night to prevent a diabetic coma from all those sugary sounds.

  Still, I tried to do a good job, and the people seemed pleased with what they were getting.

  Except for one woman. Night after night she sat alone at a table for two, drinking scotch and sodas. Her table wasn’t far from the piano and she was directly in my line of sight, absolutely expressionless as she stared my way. She was past her fortieth birthday and didn’t want anyone to know it, especially herself, but everything she did to make herself seem younger backfired.

  Her hair was dyed blond and cut short, but this only served to reveal a thickening neck that was starting to sag. She’d obviously spent time lying in the sun before the cruise, which highlighted nets of wrinkles around her eyes.

  The eyes were her best feature. They were big and violet but impossibly sad, with the deep-down sorrows of a woman who’d always followed her heart to the wrong places.

  The cruise director, a thin-lipped woman with her hair pulled up in a tight bun, filled me in on the mystery woman. She was supposed to have taken this trip with a man she’d been dating for nearly five years, but he dumped her when they reached the dock. At the dock! He told her it was all over, picked up his suitcase, got right back into the cab that had brought them to the harbor, and roared away.

  He probably assumed she would do the same thing, but she didn’t. She climbed the ramp and checked into her stateroom before joining the rest of the passengers at the rail, waving to strangers on the dock as the ship began its voyage to nowhere.

  How could anyone take a trip under those circumstances? Maybe she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to her apartment, with big bowls of dried cat food left for the tabby and the overwatered plants dripping on the floor. Maybe she harbored a wild hope of meeting somebody new on the cruise, but who? It was all couples. Everybody was taken.

  Everybody but the lounge singer.

  Each night it seemed she sat a little closer to the piano, the way a cat creeps up on a robin. By the fourth night out she was practically at my side.

  I’d sing six or seven songs to start things off, take a break when dinner was served, and then come back with the sappiest songs in my repertoire to round off the evening. Of course a lot of couples asked me to play whatever happened to be “our song” during the second half. Usually they’d dance to it, on a small wooden floor beneath the twinkle of a spinning mirrored globe.

  On the fifth night the sad-eyed woman finally spoke to me, just as I concluded the first half of the show.

  “Sit here,” she said.

  It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t quite a demand, either. She didn’t care enough to demand my presence. It was as if she just wanted to see if she could get her way.

  And she could.

  I sat across from her at a small round table for two. She had been drinking but her eyes were steady and clear, and up close they seemed to be lit from within, as if violet-flamed candles were burning behind each of them.

  “Would you care to eat with me?”

  I didn’t even know if this was allowed. They don’t like it when the help mingles with the customers, but this was an exceptional situation, and I wasn’t about to ask the cruise director for permission to dine with a guest.

  “Sure,” I said, “that’d be nice.”

  “Want a drink?”

  “I’d better not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I still have the rest of my show to do.”

  She cocked her head at me. “Are you saying you have to stay sharp for this drill?”

  It was a terribly insulting thing to say. It was also accurate and hilarious, so I laughed out loud. I was still laughing when she extended a hand and said, “I’m Sharon Sherman.”

  “Mickey DeFalco.”

  “Yes, I know. I saw your name on the ‘Appearing Nightly’ poster.”

  Her handshake was firm and strong and she held my hand longer than she had to, breaking off when the waiter came by for our orders. She asked for a scotch and soda and I told him to make it two. We both ordered the roast chicken. When the waiter went away Sharon Sherman said, “What have you heard about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, don’t bullshit me, please. It’s a small boat. People talk.”

  “Well, the buzz around campus is that your boyfriend dumped you at the dock.”

  She wanted me to be straight with her, but maybe not that straight. “Yes, well. Such economy of language. I forgot for a moment that I was speaking with a lyricist.”

  “I’m sorry, Sharon.”

  “Don’t be. You’re absolutely right. That’s exactly what happened.”

  The waiter brought our drinks. I took a sip, and it was the weakest alcoholic drink I’d ever tasted. The scotch was practically a rumor, and you’d need ten of them to get a decent buzz going.

  Sharon took half her drink in one gulp and said, “He told me he didn’t love me anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. Wait.” She closed her eyes to help herself remember. “What he said exactly was, he still loves me, but he’s not in love with me anymore. Like that makes a difference.”

  “It means he still cares.”

  “Oh, yeah. He cared enough to abandon me at the dock.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Don’t defend him!”

  “I’m not!”

  “You just did! You, of all people! The guy who wrote the all-time tearjerker about being dumped!”

  “Take it easy, Sharon!”

  “Ahh, it doesn’t matter.” She got to her feet, her legs surprisingly lean for the plump torso they were supporting. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Tell them to hurry up with the food, I need something in my stomach.”

  She left the table, staggering her way to the bathroom to murmurs from the crowd. I wondered how she could be drunk on such weak drinks, and then it hit me.

  I took a sip from her glass. It had a kick
like a mule. The watered-down drinks were for the entertainer, to make sure he was in shape for the after-dinner show. The cruise director had all situations covered.

  I spotted her at the far side of the dining room, threw her a wave, hoisted my glass. She hurried over, smiling as falsely as a human being can smile.

  “Be very careful, Mr. DeFalco.”

  “Miss Sherman invited me to dine.”

  “How wonderful. Please don’t do anything to make her unhappy.”

  “I’d say she’s already about as unhappy as anyone can be.”

  The cruise director’s smile widened, in direct defiance of what she was actually feeling. “Please remember that we are on a boat,” she singsonged. “If this goes wrong, there’s nowhere to go.”

  She wanted to say more, but just then Sharon Sherman returned to the table, so all she could do was pat me on the back and ask Sharon if everything was satisfactory. Sharon assured her that it was, and the cruise director walked away smiling.

  Sharon sat down and said, “Is she afraid we’re going to hump?”

  I burst out laughing for the second time that night. I was trying to think of the last time a woman had made me laugh out loud twice in one night, or even once, for that matter.

  “She’s afraid of me making you unhappy,” I explained.

  “I’m already unhappy.”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “I don’t remember a ‘don’t-hump-the-singer’ clause in the cruise handbook. Did I miss that?”

  Before I could answer, the waiter arrived with our chicken dinners. Sharon dug right in, with the appetite of a woman no longer worried about her weight. She ate everything on her plate and my baked potato as well.

  “Don’t worry, Mickey, nothing’s going to happen between us,” she said. “I only asked you to sit down because you looked as bored and lonely as me. Okay? Now finish your chicken. It’s not bad, for cruise food. You’ll need your strength for the second show. I’m going to be making a lot of requests. Can you play ‘Push Push in the Bush’?”

  I laughed so hard I spit a mouthful of chicken on the floor.

  Sharon Sherman managed the office of an insurance company in Pasadena, a job she’d had for seventeen years. She could always tell when people were about to get divorced or married or thought they were soon to die because they shuffled their benefits and beneficiaries around. It was dull work until you took the time to figure out what people were up to. Then it became a fascinating study in the dark side of human behavior.

  As far as Sharon Sherman was concerned, there was no bright side to human behavior, especially in the wake of what had just happened to her.

  She was forty-two years old. She had never married, never lived with anyone. She had expected that her forty-nine-year-old boyfriend, Benny, would pop the question on this trip, but everybody knew what happened instead. It took a few days for the shock to pass, and when it did, Sharon had to admit something awful to herself—she was relieved.

  We sat on adjoining chairs on the promenade deck, blankets over our legs, steaming cups of chicken broth in our hands. On the other side of the boat a shuffleboard tournament was in full swing, but Sharon had no interest in that. She was content to gaze out on the endless Pacific, where her thoughts could roam forever.

  “If I’m honest, Mickey, it hit me as I watched him walk away. He walked like a duck, both feet sticking out, and it was like the end of a Charlie Chaplin movie, when the Little Tramp strolls off into the sunset. And I said to myself, how could I spend five years of my life with that clown? How?”

  She stared at me, waiting for an answer. What could I say?

  “You were in love,” I ventured.

  “The hell I was!”

  “You must have felt something if you booked this Cruise to Nowhere.”

  She snorted. “What I actually had was a life to nowhere. You go on and on with somebody out of habit. You hang in there because there’s always another event on the horizon—Christmas, or a birthday, or a vacation. And the years just…go by, you know?”

  She sipped her broth, regarded me through half-closed eyes. “You might not believe it to look at me, but I can actually be quite a difficult person.”

  “I’m shocked to hear that.”

  “Fuck you, DeFalco,” she said sweetly.

  A roar of cheers reached us from the other side of the ship.

  “Somebody must have made a hell of a shuffleboard shot,” I said.

  “Yes, they do get excited about these little tournaments, don’t they? Benny would have loved the competition. He actually enjoys shuffleboard.” She took a sip of broth, shook her head in wonder. “How the hell could I have wasted my time with a man like that?”

  “Well, they can be pretty charming, those shuffleboarders. And they’ve got good wrists.”

  Sharon gave my shoulder a playful punch. “Hey, Mickey. What do you say you and I go to the other side of this tub and throw all the shuffleboard disks overboard?” She giggled, thrilled by her own idea. “Come on. We’ll wreak havoc!”

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea, Sharon.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, they’d probably bill you for the equipment, and they’d fire me.”

  “How could they fire you? We’re in the middle of nowhere. The passengers would miss out on their last night of entertainment.”

  “Sharon—”

  “Maybe they’d throw us in the brig! Think this ship has a brig?”

  “I doubt it very much.”

  “You don’t get rattled very easily, do you? I’m talking like a crazy woman, and you’re perfectly calm.”

  “Something about the sea relaxes me.”

  “That’s not it. You really don’t care, do you?”

  “About what?”

  “About anything, ever since you had your heart broken.”

  I stared at her long and hard, the way you do when you’ve been recognized for what you really are and there’s no place to hide, unless you jump overboard. I wasn’t about to do that.

  “I guess I don’t, Sharon Sherman.”

  “Well, if you don’t care, why don’t you come with me now and help put an end to this shuffleboard madness once and for all?”

  I looked past Sharon, to the far end of the deck. The cruise director stood there staring at me, nodding ever so slightly, just to let me know she was on the job.

  Jesus Christ. That did it.

  I sipped my broth, leaned close to Sharon. “Now’s not the time. We’ll do it tonight, after my last show, and really mess things up for them.” I winked at her. “Tomorrow’s supposed to be the tournament finals. We’ll see about that.”

  Sharon’s eyes sparkled with delight. I was beginning to see what Benny had seen in her, back when she had dreams.

  The full moon shone so brightly that the two of us actually cast sharp shadows out there on the deck. It was past midnight, and just about everybody was in bed as the ship sped along on its senseless journey. The only sound was the hum of the engines and the burbling of water in the ship’s wake.

  We’d both been drinking but our mission kept us focused. They served me full-strength drinks when my last set was finished, so I had a nice load on.

  The shuffleboard court was painted right onto the deck, enameled red paint on the wood grain. The poles and disks were in a tall wooden cabinet at the side of the court. Sharon opened the cabinet, picked up a pole, hoisted it like a javelin, took a few running steps toward the rail and let it fly. We couldn’t see it but we heard it splash far below.

  “That’s one, Mickey.”

  There were half a dozen shuffleboard poles and we each chucked three over the side. I got much better distance on my throws than she did. I wondered if they’d sink or float. They were hollow metal tubes with wooden handles on one end and wooden half-moons on the other, to cradle the disks. Sharon let her last pole fly and flopped in a deck chair, winded by her efforts.

  “You do the disks, Mickey,
I’m too drunk.”

  There were a dozen disks, half red, half black, like giant checkers made from some stony composite. No way those babies could float. I got rid of them one at a time like a discus thrower, whirling my way to the rail and letting them fly. They hovered unseen in the night air for a few seconds before splashing down.

  By the twelfth disk I was winded. Sweat soaked my shirt. Sharon Sherman put her hands on my shoulders.

  “That was great!”

  “Yeah, I enjoyed it, too.”

  “Can you imagine what they’ll be like out here tomorrow morning? They’ll be going crazy!”

  “Crazy?”

  “That’s what I said, crazy….”

  She grabbed me by the cheeks, pulled my face to hers, and gave me a savage kiss. She kicked off her shoes and then shrugged her way out of her slacks and her underwear, still kissing me hard.

  Then Sharon Sherman, naked from the waist down but buttoned up and proper from the waist up, began walking backwards until her hands found the deck rail at the prow of the ship. She reached behind to grab it and stood with her feet apart, like a surfer.

  “Right here, Mickey,” she said. “I’m on the pill, by the way.”

  I dropped my pants. She was ready for it. Our shuffleboard crime had served as all the foreplay we would need.

  She leaned backwards against the rail, her back arched over the top of it, head upside down, facing the waters we were plowing through. Her legs were scissored around me, locked at the ankles behind my back. I was humping her and keeping her from falling overboard at the same time.

  She shuddered with a climax, keeping her back arched. She let her arms drop from my shoulders, stretched her hands to the sky, and cried, “I’m the Queen of the World!”

  Then it was my turn to get there and I did, momentarily losing my balance in a spasm that could have sent both of us over the rail, which would have been a hell of a thing, as the ship would have plowed over us and chopped us to bits in its giant propeller.

  But we didn’t fall. I regained my balance and pulled Sharon all the way back on board, still inside her, her legs still straddling me. We held that position for a moment or two until Sharon loosened her grip, and as her feet touched the deck I slid out of her and she kissed me gently on the mouth.