Captain Tannenbaume threw off the covers from his side of the bed, grabbed the phone off the bulkhead, and dialed the bridge. When his mother answered, he told her to put Mitzi on the phone.
“She’s in the middle of giving Swifty a pedicure.”
“Finish pedicuring Swifty yourself, Mother, and send Mitzi down to my cabin, pronto.”
“Is something wrong, sonny?”
“Yes, Mother, something is wrong,” Captain Tannenbaume said. “I quit. Tell that Commodore of yours to find himself another superintendent.”
Mitzi and his mother were in Captain Tannenbaume’s cabin before he had a chance to hang up the phone.
“Okay,” Mitzi said without prompting, “forget the Saturday night–only thing. Have sex as often as you’d like. Just don’t let it get out that you have sex twice a day, or the women in Great Neck’ll think you’re Irish or something.”
“And the hand jobs?” Captain Tannenbaume asked.
“As far as the hand jobs are concerned,” Mitzi said, “we can go with fake nails, so maybe Sylvia could just remove the fake nails for the hand jobs and put them back on for formal functions.”
His mother raised her eyebrows.
“What?” Mitzi said.
“I don’t get this business about the hand jobs. Aren’t they messy, sonny?”
Captain Tannenbaume didn’t want to have this conversation with his mother, but there was no way around it. “A regular hand job keeps my prostate nice and limber, mess or no mess.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mitzi said. “Mogie swears by them.”
Captain Tannenbaume’s ears perked up. “Mogie?”
Mitzi waved her hand. “An old boyfriend.”
Captain Tannenbaume looked away. So Mogie’s her boyfriend? He ran his fingers slowly through his hair. He did not want to let on that he knew about the reams of telexes that Sparks had been intercepting from some guy named Mogie. Mostly, he didn’t want to let on about the reams of telexes that Sparks had been sending back.
“So that’s settled then?” his mother said. “You’re back on board, sonny?”
Captain Tannenbaume did not respond. He was thinking about the telex he had picked up off Sparks’s desk a few days back—it was the very first time Captain Tannenbaume had read a telex not meant for him. There was something in it about a stool. Some fellow named Mogie had wanted to know if Mitzi missed his stool. knowing Mogie was an old boyfriend changed the complexion of that question.
“Sonny boy? You’re not really going to quit are you?”
Captain Tannenbaume could not take his eyes off Mitzi. So Mitzi gave hand jobs. Was that what the stool was for? Captain Tannenbaume pictured a farmer milking a cow. The dexterity of it all sent his heart racing.
“Sonny?”
Mitzi. You farmer’s daughter you.
“Sonny!”
“Yes, Mother. Yes. I mean, no. No, mother, I won’t quit. As long as Sylvia continues to take care of me.”
Captain Tannenbaume did not look at his mother when he said it. He only had eyes for Mitzi, the farmer’s daughter with the special stool.
The God is Able managed to make its way into the Red Sea unscathed. Swifty and his fellow deck officers simply followed the other ships that were steaming in the same direction. They were all going to the same place, of course—the Suez Canal—and there was only one way to get there. At the same time, Swifty managed to keep out of Captain Tannenbaume’s hair. Having been relieved of the burden of celestial navigation, not to mention the stress of having to fake the noon position reports, Swifty and his fellow navigation officers actually enjoyed the journey up the Red Sea. The mates basked in the collegial atmosphere of Mitzi’s salon, using the engineers and cooks and stewards—who gathered on the bridge waiting their turn for Mitzi’s services—as lookouts and helmsmen while they, the mates, received their manicures and pedicures. Swifty had become so enamored of his daily pedicure that he handed over more and more of his watch-keeping duties to the others so that he could enjoy his time in the captain’s-cum-barber’s chair without the tedious interruptions of navigating a ship in a congested waterway.
As the ship proceeded northbound toward the canal, ship traffic increased significantly, and Swifty had the others answer the incessant VHF calls from ships bearing down on the God is Able from every direction. He taught the engineers to make meeting arrangements with oncoming ships. He taught the cooks how to make overtaking arrangements with ships that were overtaking them. And he taught Mrs. Tannenbaume how to deal with crossing traffic. Mrs. Tannenbaume had a hard time with the rules for crossing vessels. She could not abide having to change course for a ship just because it was on her starboard side. Why couldn’t the other guy change course, she had asked Swifty. Why did she have to be the one?
Swifty told her that’s what the Rules of the Road stated: a vessel that has another vessel on its starboard side is the give-way vessel. Period.
Mrs. Tannenbaume did not agree with the Rules of the Road. She called them arbitrary. “Fine,” Swifty said. “If you do not want to alter course, then hold your course and speed. You’ll see what happens.”
Within the hour, an enormous tanker in semi-ballasted condition was crossing the path of the God is Able from right to left. Swifty was getting his nails done in “the chair,” and Mrs. Tannenbaume, acting as lookout, told him that there was a ship on their starboard bow. Swifty told her to alter course to starboard to pass under the other ship’s stern.
“No way, José,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said, peering through a pair of binoculars. “That sucker’s going to have to alter course for us.”
“Fine,” Swifty said. “Do it your way. Mitzi, do we have any more of the clear polish? My pedicure lasts longer that way.”
Mrs. Tannenbaume ignored the urgent calls coming in over the VHF radio. A half-hour later, the tanker was within a half-mile of the God is Able. The other ship blew the danger signal, five short and angry blasts on the steam whistle, in an effort to get Mrs. Tannenbaume to alter course, but Mrs. Tannenbaume was not budging. The tanker passed ahead of them by no more than a hundred yards.
“Okay, that was too close for comfort,” Swifty said. “Captain Tannenbaume’s standing orders call for a Closest Point of Approach of one nautical mile.
“Standing orders my tush,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said. “A miss is as good as a mile.”
“But the standing orders—”
“Show me these standing orders.”
The phone rang. It was the chief wanting to know who was blowing the danger signal.
“It’s all under control,” Mrs. Tannenbaume assured him.
“It doesn’t sound like it’s under control. We don’t exactly feel so comfortable down here relying on you mates to keep us safe,” the chief growled. “By the way, you guys keeping a good lookout for pirates?”
“Oh, pirates, schmirates.”
“If it was my department, I’d have run out some fire hoses.”
“You worry about your department and let me worry about mine.”
“Oh, and now it’s your department?” the chief said. “From supernumerary to captain? And speaking of captains, where is that son of yours anyway? I haven’t seen him for days.”
“He needs his rest, leave him out of this,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said. “Besides, we’re doing just fine up here without him.”
“Well it sure doesn’t sound like you’re doing fine,” the chief said, and hung up the phone.
Mrs. Tannenbaume turned to Swifty. “Tell me more about this danger signal.”
“Get the Nautical Rules of the Road off the bookshelf. It’s the blue book on the end. You can see it in black and white for yourself.”
When Mrs. Tannenbaume brought the book over to him—Mitzi was blowing his nails dry with the heat gun—Swifty told her to open the book and turn to Rule Thirty-four, Maneuvering and Warning Signals. He read subsection (d) aloud.
“When vessels in sight of one another are approaching each other and from any caus
e either vessel fails to understand the actions or intentions of the other, or is in doubt whether sufficient action is being taken by the other to avoid collision, the vessel in doubt shall immediately indicate such doubt by giving five short and rapid blasts on the whistle.”
“So you blow the danger signal when you don’t know what the other ship wants?”
“Well, rule 34 refers to ‘doubt,’ but mariners call five short and rapid blasts the ‘danger signal.’ But the danger signal is sounded not so much to convey actual danger, as to say, in effect, ‘Get the hell out of my way.’ Of course—”
“I’ve heard enough,” Mrs. Tannenbaume said and put the rule book back up on the shelf where it belonged. “I know exactly what to do now.”
The danger signal became Mrs. Tannenbaume’s favorite new whistle signal. She blew it morning, noon, and night, and with Mrs. Tannenbaume at the conn, the God is Able barreled its way up the Red Sea, a trail of angry ships in her wake.
DOING FOR OTHERS
Mogie had sent his first telex to the God is Able before the ship even departed Singapore. He was evidently desperate to know if Mitzi had any trouble with the Malaysian taxi drivers in Singapore who, Mogie heard, liked redheads. The next telex from Mogie came when the ship was still in the straits of Malacca, and then there was nothing for several days. Then the one about the stool arrived, and after Sparks wrote back, pretending to be Mitzi, the telexes began to arrive in bunches —two, three, sometimes four or five in a day.
When Captain Tannenbaume first discovered, years before on a long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and across the South Atlantic to Brazil, that Sparks was reading other people’s mail, he was mortified. He told Sparks it was an invasion of privacy and that he would not stand for it. But time after time during that voyage, he entered the radio shack only to find Sparks’s nose buried in a telex meant for someone else. Captain Tannenbaume knew that he could not stop Sparks from reading other people’s telexes, and it eventually dawned on him that it might be better, in the end, if Sparks did read them. Radio officers had a tendency to get squirrelly on the long sea passages, what with all that time on their hands, and if reading other people’s mail provided some degree of respite for Sparks, then perhaps Captain Tannenbaume ought to turn a blind eye to the questionable practice.
It wasn’t until later, on another long sea passage, that Captain Tannenbaume realized that not only did Sparks read telexes that were not meant for him, but he responded to them as well. Again Captain Tannenbaume tried to stop him, and again he found his efforts frustrated by the ever-persistent Sparks. Although he did not approve of what Sparks was doing, he had to admit that every once in a while he found his curiosity piqued whenever Sparks was deep in a back-and-forth with an unsuspecting pen pal. But until this voyage, he had resisted the urge to find out what exactly it was that Sparks wrote in his telexes.
Maybe it was the stress of having his mother and wife on board. Maybe he was feeling restless over his impending life change, but something had made Captain Tannenbaume pick up and read a telex that he well knew was not addressed to him.
The telex was from a man named Mogie, and it was about a stool.
Captain Tannenbaume was disgusted by his lack of discipline. How could he read something that he knew was meant for someone else? And after all of his lecturing about invading another’s privacy? Although he was indeed curious about the nature of the telex—who Mogie was, and what this business was about a stool—Captain Tannenbaume quickly got a hold of himself, walked out of the radio shack, and banished from his mind all thoughts of reading any more telexes.
Until he heard Mitzi say that Mogie was her boyfriend.
He didn’t know why that affected him so much. Was Captain Tannenbaume so naïve as to think that a woman like Mitzi did not have a long trail of suitors? That a woman so dexterous, so capable, so in charge did not have a boyfriend on the side? For all he knew, maybe it wasn’t just one. Maybe there were others, lots of others. She was, after all, carrying on with the chief. Oh, Captain Tannenbaume knew that the big Swede was all talk when it came to women but who really knew what went on in her cabin after the chief let himself in with the breakfast tray every morning. And what about that electrician? The little shit was probably changing out her lightbulbs this very moment. Well, Captain Tannenbaume could not very well snoop around on Mitzi and the chief, and he didn’t want to look silly by ordering the electrician to stay away from Mitzi’s cabin, but he could find out about this Mogie character. He could, if he wanted, just sneak into the radio shack and read the telexes from Mogie himself. He could.
And in the end, he did.
When Sparks was at coffee time one morning, Captain Tannenbaume snooped around the radio shack until he found the telexes in the top left-hand drawer of Sparks’s desk. Sure enough, Sparks had written back that he (she) did not miss Mogie’s stool, that there were plenty of stools aboard the God is Able. Sparks, pretending that he was Mitzi, said he (she) was in stool heaven.
Sparks’s response produced an outpouring from Mogie. A new telex was on the wires before the last had printed. Sparks answered each one. He clearly had a way—born of long practice, Captain Tannenbaume was afraid—of pushing Mogie’s buttons with one word. The telexes from Mogie kept coming until the top left-hand drawer was crammed full.
When Sparks came back from coffee time that day, he found Captain Tannenbaume at his desk. Captain Tannenbaume didn’t even try to hide the fact that he’d read the telexes.
“So what exactly does Mogie do with this stool of his?” Captain Tannenbaume blurted out.
“I . . . I don’t know. I’m still trying to guh . . . get it out of Mogie. When you’re pruh . . . pruh . . . pretending to be someone else, you can’t ask any obvious questions.”
“Right, well . . . keep me in the loop regarding this Mogie. It’s a matter of security.”
Sparks did keep Captain Tannenbaume in the loop. He showed him every telex he received from Mogie the moment it arrived. Soon Captain Tannenbaume huddled with Sparks every morning so that he would be there when the first telex arrived. Together he and Sparks crafted a response.
Mogie wrote that the thought of so many stools on board was driving him foolish. He wanted to know what the sailors’ stools looked like. Sparks wrote back that they were handcrafted of exotic hardwoods and covered in Spanish leather. Sparks wrote to Mogie that the ship’s carpenter was making a new stool just for him (her). Mogie was furious and wanted to know why Sparks (Mitzi) needed a new stool.
Captain Tannenbaume was so preoccupied with the telexes that he holed himself up in his cabin and shut out the world. He did not hear the danger signal his mother blew at every passing ship. He was unaware that Swifty had abdicated all of his watch-keeping duties to the sailors and engineers who crowded the bridge every day. He no longer joined his shipmates for coffee time. He even replaced his own lightbulbs for fear the electrician would say or do something to get his goat. He simply could not afford the break in concentration.
Captain Tannenbaume became desperate to know what exactly Mogie did with his stool. But he and Sparks just couldn’t figure it out.
“Tell me again what you like best about the stool?” Sparks asked. Mogie wrote back that it made him feel like a king.
“What else?” Sparks asked. Mogie said it made him feel tall.
Captain Tannenbaume couldn’t understand that one. How could Mitzi sitting on a stool milking Mogie make him feel tall?
Mogie wrote long telexes reminiscing about the many times—and places—he and Mitzi used the stool, but still he did not give a glimpse as to what the stool was for.
Captain Tannenbaume became convinced that Sparks should be more direct in his questioning. Sparks told Captain Tannenbaume that one had to be careful when playing this game. One false move would blow their identity. “Patience,” Sparks counseled. “Patience.”
Patience my ass. And so without thinking too much about it, when the ship was in the Suez Canal and Sp
arks was on the bridge sightseeing, Captain Tannenbaume fired off a telex of his own.
Sylvia left the bridge without saying goodbye to anyone, not that anyone on the bridge even noticed that she left. Things were beginning to get a little crazy up there, what with Mitzi being fully booked and every sailor aboard wanting either a manicure or a pedicure, or both. The sailors, who used to compare the buildup of their varnishing jobs, now compared the buildup on their nails. They even showed Mitzi how to scuff up the first few coats of nail polish so that the final coat would hold better and create a deeper shine.
The engineers, it turned out, were Mitzi’s best customers, and the chief did not like it one bit when his engineers began showing off their manicured hands at coffee time. The chief had long prided himself on being the only one in the engine department with clean fingernails, and he wondered aloud if anybody down below was slinging wrenches anymore. The engineers told the chief that slinging wrenches would damage their cuticles, that Mitzi had told them that they should be able to see a—air quotes—“half-moon” in their fingernails, that a—air quotes—“half-moon” was the sign of a healthy cuticle. The engineers used air quotes more than ever, now that their cuticles were healthy.
Sylvia just wanted to lie down. She had spent the entire morning getting her hair blow-dried, her eyebrows tweezed, her nose hairs trimmed, her toes painted, and now she just wanted to get away from Mitzi for a little while. Mitzi had let Sylvia know this morning that she was not happy with the progress she was making in her assertiveness training. But Sylvia could not imagine being any more assertive than she was already. She asserted herself everywhere—on the bridge, in the lounge, not to mention in the officers’ mess, where she had never sent back so many things in all her life. Just yesterday in the officers’ mess she had sent back her ice water (too icy), chocolate cake (too chocolatey), sweet tea (too sweet), and her ice water again (not icy enough). She bossed her husband around without mercy, meddled in his business, and kvetched without letup. Sylvia complained about everything in her life from morning ‘til night, but still Mitzi was not satisfied. And on top of the complaining and kvetching and meddling, Mitzi now informed Sylvia that she was not doing enough for others! A Great Neck wife feels compelled to “do for others,” Mitzi had told her. The first thing Mitzi asked Sylvia when she arrived on the bridge every day for her daily pedicure was “are you doing for others?” So now Sylvia spent what spare moments she had in the day putting together care packages for the needy children back home in Phuket. Sylvia was beginning to feel that the life of a pampered Great Neck wife was not all that it was cracked up to be. Between getting herself made-up every day, not letting anyone push her around, and doing for others, she was exhausted. It was no wonder the women in Great Neck only schtupped once a week.
A Commodore of Errors Page 24