“I have plans already,” said Laura, the warmth drained from her voice, shading into formality. “But thank you.”
“Yeah,” said Mick, “I should have figured.”
“Well, I’ll be right back with your beer and burger. And your margarita!” she said to Christine as she walked off.
“Thanks,” said Christine, glancing up and looking quickly back down at her book. Mick sat very still, staring after Laura. She could feel how fixed his mind was. Maybe he was drunk. Of course he was drunk. She hoped Laura would be careful when she got off work.
After a while, a different waitress, this one dark and small and tough-looking, brought an enormous round white plastic tray and lowered it onto the table in front of her: the tacos. The steam rising from the hot fish made Christine ravenous.
“There you go,” said the waitress as she put Christine’s margarita down.
“I’ll be right back with your order, sir,” she said in Mick’s direction, walking off.
Christine could feel Mick watching her as she took a bite of her tacos. They were delicious, the grilled fish fresh and tender, the lime slices ripe and juicy, corn tortillas warm and soft. She gobbled it all down, taking periodic sips of her sweet, tangy drink, which she happily noticed was heavy on the tequila, and let her attention wander around the room, carefully not looking at Mick. At the bar, a girl who looked fifteen or so stood talking to a man on a barstool, leaning in close to him. She wore a leather jacket, and below that, apparently nothing. Her small, globelike butt cheeks glowed. When she bent slightly at the waist, Christine saw her bikini bottoms flash, but then the girl straightened and was once again half naked. The man she was talking to put an arm around her and pulled her into a half hug. He must be her father, Christine told herself, knowing she was wrong. More likely her roommate’s father.
She finished the tacos and downed the last gulp of sweet-tart melted ice in her drink, and sat back, panting gently. She was a bit tipsy, she realized, but whether this helped or worsened her sense of displaced alienation wasn’t clear. It was amazing that you could get on an airplane in Portland, Maine, before one o’clock in the afternoon, change planes in Chicago, and get off in California at just after five o’clock in the evening. She felt as if most of her psyche was still hanging somewhere over the Midwest.
When the short, dark waitress finally brought Mick’s burger and beer, Christine signaled for the check and absentmindedly ruffled the pages of her paperback while she waited.
Mick turned abruptly to her. Startled, she met his gaze. His dark eyes, unexpectedly sharp and intelligent, studied her, and for an instant she imagined she could see straight into his brute, embittered soul, and he could see back into hers, whatever it looked like. Probably bland and unremarkable to him, she thought, and she looked away, embarrassed, as the check came and she signed it to her room, and left the bar.
When she stepped outside, it was almost dark. She braced herself for the familiar bone-deep chill, tensing her arms close to her body and hunching her shoulders, but the air was still bathwater temperature, much warmer than the air-conditioned hotel had been, and her nose filled with the green, sweet smell of vegetation, a pleasurable shock after the sterile winter. She could feel her whole body relax into the unexpected relief of it. Strolling along the harbor path, she passed a few dawdling people, probably hotel guests like her, maybe fellow cruise-goers. She stopped to stare at the lights on the water. The harbor was a giant crescent around a calm and gleaming bay. Pelicans perched on the docks near moored sightseeing ships. Farther along, a ska band played an old Bob Marley song at a slightly slower-than-normal tempo, “Lively up yourself, and don’t be no drag.” The singer’s accent was Latino. Christine stopped to listen, found herself sitting in the cool grass watching a small group of toddlers spinning around to the music, jigging up and down, calling to their parents to watch them.
The sight of these small, exuberant people made her anxious. She and Ed had been married for seven years. He wanted children. She didn’t. There was no rational explanation for why she didn’t want them. It was just a feeling. But she knew it was hard for Ed to understand. She wished she could tell him exactly how she felt on those bleak winter days, when the world was muffled with frigid snow, and she would look around their small rough farmhouse, and out at the white-shrouded woods and rocky meadows, the frozen lake, the middle of nowhere. She pictured herself as a nineteenth-century farm wife, bearing children in pain and danger, nursing and tending and rocking and nurturing them one by one as they arrived, along with all the other daily and seasonal chores. That had been her great-grandmother’s life, even her grandmother’s. The silence and isolation. The endless hard work: cleaning, washing, chopping wood, canning. It was the same work Christine did now, but in those days she would have done it all by hand, without a vacuum cleaner or a chainsaw, heating water on a woodstove, without any regular contact with the outside world: no telephone, e-mail, Internet. The reality of marriage back then, the rock-bottom duty of it all, always made her shudder—half pleasantly, because it wasn’t actually her life. But it was close enough.
She resurfaced from her thoughts to discover that she was striding along the harbor path again. At some point she’d left the band behind, the dancing children, and now she was headed toward a grassy knoll, on top of which was a lighthouse. It could have been on the Maine coast.
Christine took off her shoes and sat, resting her chin on her bent knees, pressing her bare soles against the coarse sweet-smelling grass of the short hill, feeling a shivery pleasure in her solitude, a sense of possibility opening up before her as she gazed at the rosy water in the lowering light. Far out on what looked like islands was a gaggle of tall, spindly, insect-like oil rigs, gently bobbing as they pumped. Nearer in, the lights of the harbor glowed brighter as the sky got dark. Pelicans plummeted with open beaks toward the water. Even though they were rapacious predators, they looked appealingly clumsy and top-heavy. In the harbor, a freighter lay low in the water, stacked high with shipping containers, waiting to be unloaded by the cranes on the dock. She wondered what they were full of: maybe sneakers and cheap clothes from China or India, made by children in airless shacks. Or stuff made in shabby Third World factories, electronics or plastic toys or flimsy designer knockoffs of watches, bags, sunglasses. So much junk in the world, she thought: so much useless trash. Off to her right, in the next harbor over, hulked the grand, black-hulled Queen Mary, with her trio of raked funnels and black-on-red livery. Maybe the Queen Isabella was behind her, already in berth.
It struck Christine as completely absurd that she had just flown across the entire country and was about to get on a boat and sail to Hawaii. Back home, people went on cruises that left from Portland or Boston and sailed down the Atlantic coast to the Caribbean, or up to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Not that she’d ever been on a cruise before. She hated cruise ships. If Valerie hadn’t invited her and insisted through Christine’s repeated demurrals, Christine would never have agreed to do it.
But now that she was here, sitting in this seductive warmth, she was glad that she had. She felt the farm and Ed recede in her mind on a wave of tequila, along with her dog’s illness, the long and harsh winter she’d just endured, the spring planting cycle starting up anew, training the summer’s two apprentices. She knew all the hard work that waited for her as soon as she got home. She had been born into that work. She’d tried to escape it, had gone to journalism school, moved to New York and succeeded there, but Maine had called her back, in the end, as it did so many of its natives. Come back now, take care of me, it had called querulously, the opposite of a siren song, and she’d gone back, to marry a farmer, as Barnes women did.
Her phone buzzed. She took it out and looked at the screen. It was a text from Valerie. “Flight canceled. Taking the 6AM tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the ship, I guess? Hope you’re having fun!”
She wrote back, typin
g slowly with one thumb tip because she’d never learned to use two: “How horrible, so sorry. It’s great here. Call me when you land tomorrow.”
Feeling lighthearted at the prospect of a night alone in her own bed in her own room, Christine got up, slid her feet back into her shoes, and headed back along the path, toward the music, the dancing babies, the lights.
chapter two
The nonstop El Al flight from Tel Aviv to Los Angeles took fifteen hours and landed on the same day it left. During that entire day, as the plane followed its imaginary dotted line across the globe to crackling, tinny music (Miriam still thought in old newsreel images even though the last one she’d seen in a theater had been sometime in the 1950s), she worried about her violin, which was securely tucked overhead in its Bobelock crescent case with its strings properly loosened.
Miriam worried about her violin actively, as she would worry about a dog or a small child that might start whining or need its diaper changed. She tried to sleep for a few hours with her head smooshed on a little pillow against the window, but her body could never get comfortable on a plane. She found that if she didn’t keep things moving, it all tightened up and ached.
Also, Isaac, her ex-husband, sitting next to her in the middle seat, was snoring. They had both grown up in the United States and emigrated to Israel in the mid-1960s. There, they had met as soldiers during the Six-Day War, in 1967, and had been married from 1971 until the late 1990s; it was hard for her to pinpoint when or why, exactly, the marriage had ended. They had finally gotten around to finalizing their divorce sometime later; again, the exact date eluded her, maybe because it didn’t matter, in the end, since neither of them had ever remarried. Their passports proved that she and Isaac still shared a last name, his family’s: Koslow. It was so close to Miriam’s family name, Kosner, she hadn’t seen the point in changing it back.
They even lived in the same Tel Aviv high-rise building, which wasn’t exactly an old-age home, or even assisted living, but it was chock-full of old people, and there were nurses and doctors on staff and a dining room on the mezzanine that served kosher food soft enough for the toothless and bland enough for the dyspeptic. Isaac’s larger apartment had a view of the Mediterranean, while Miriam, who lived on a lower floor, had a view of an unremarkable section of downtown Tel Aviv. Isaac was richer than Miriam because of a family inheritance, and she hadn’t taken any of it in the divorce. All she had was what she made, performing with the Sabra String Quartet, which she and Isaac had formed in 1975 with Sasha Spektor and Jakov Strauss, and giving violin lessons. She couldn’t afford to retire; not yet, anyway. Sometimes she thought about just moving in with Isaac and selling her place, not that he had offered that as a solution, but she was fairly certain she could bully him into it. So far, she had been able to keep going without resorting to that, but it was her backup plan in case her savings weren’t enough when she got too decrepit to play music anymore. The Sabra Quartet had been performing together for more than forty years and was starting to fray around the edges: they were all getting old. They were in their last years together. They all knew it.
And yet here they were again, on yet another long plane ride, flying halfway around the world to play for their billionaire friends and benefactors, Larry and Rivka Weiss, on their two-week cruise to Hawaii. Miriam couldn’t wait until the whole thing was over and she could be home again.
The stewardess, who had been working her way down the aisle with the drinks cart, had almost reached her row. “Stewardess” was the wrong word now. Flight attendants, you were meant to call them. Language was always changing, both English and Hebrew, and it was sometimes impossible to keep up. Everything was so politically correct now. Everyone was so sensitive. And being bilingual made it more complicated. Miriam didn’t mean to screw up, she just couldn’t help it. She had to tell herself not to say “schwartze” and “faygala” anymore, but sometimes she forgot.
The stewardess was smiling at Miriam, her head cocked with inquisitive politeness, as if she’d just shouted a question at a daft person, which she probably had. She was a gorgeous young thing, an olive-skinned, sloe-eyed Sabra with raven hair and lush lips. They were a dime a dozen in Israel, but it didn’t make them any less appealing. Miriam thought they were the most beautiful women in the world.
“Tomato juice, please,” said Miriam in Hebrew. “With some vodka on the side. I’d like Smirnoff if you have it.”
“Bloody Mary mix?” the girl asked. “It’s kosher.”
“No!” Miriam said, in English now. “I hate that stuff, ecch, celery salt. Straight tomato juice. Kosher, I don’t care about. Do you have any plain potato chips?”
“The snacks cart is right behind me,” said the girl.
Isaac was awake and awaiting his turn to order. The sound of him drawing in his breath with a slight wet catch in his throat caused Miriam to clench her jaw and dig a fingernail into her palm. She had known this man almost her entire life and she had wanted to strangle or eviscerate him so many times, she no longer even noticed the urge when it came upon her.
Of course he was going to ask for a seltzer.
“Seltzer, please,” he said in English. Isaac had never quite gotten the hang of Hebrew, even after all these decades, although he spoke it well enough when he had to. Miriam knew how proud he was; it made him insecure not to speak a language other than his native one, even though all the newly arrived Israelis of their generation had learned it together from scratch in the ulpanim. “Can I have the whole can?”
As the jet thrummed through the thin, high altitudes above the earth, they drank their beverages side by side, Isaac taking little sips of his, Miriam slugs of hers. The carbonation made his nose twitch. The vodka entered her bloodstream and made her feel fiery and young again. She crunched her potato chips. He sniffed, nibbled at his chocolate chip cookie. She closed her eyes and hummed, very lightly, her second-violin part to one of Schubert’s slow movements, she couldn’t remember which one right now. She could feel Isaac there next to her like a part of herself. Divorced or not, she knew that he was envious of her cocktail. He was allergic to liquor. It inflamed his cheeks and made him nauseated. One sip was enough. He’d been a great pothead in his day, but his lungs were too old now to tolerate it, so he ate it baked into sweets, which he loved.
On the plane, in the row behind them, sat the quartet’s other half with Jakov’s cello in the middle seat between them. Sasha, the first violinist, was drinking black coffee. Jakov was drinking red wine. They were an interesting pair: Sasha looked like a swarthy hawk with his strong tall body and sharp short hawk’s beak of a nose and Russian black eyes and black-and-white wavy hair that hadn’t thinned with age. Jakov the Lion’s former wild mane of ginger curls had faded to a fluffy white-gold, but his face was still cherubic and catlike with pouting lips and slanted gold-green eyes. Miriam still thought both men were nice to look at, and for a while, way back when, she’d yearned to schtup them both. Not at the same time, necessarily; or maybe at the same time, sure, why not, since it was all purely hypothetical and always would be.
Really, Sasha was the one she’d always had a crush on, for as long as she’d known him. Once, fifteen years ago, during the slow movement of Schubert’s Rosamunde Quartet, she and Sasha, side by side on their violins, had shared an interval of soulful communion with the music and each other. She was stirred for days afterward, all fluttery around him. He was the same around her, too, but they hadn’t dared act on any of these feelings. Never mind that he was married. This was separate from that. This was music, this was work, this was their shared livelihood. And Isaac. They couldn’t do that to Isaac. It would destroy the quartet. Besides, playing music together was sexy enough, most of the time. Except of course when there was squabbling or discord, which happened frequently, as it did in any family. The quartet was like a four-way marriage, she sometimes thought. But all this time, secretly, Sasha had been the one she wanted to b
e married to, for real. And she’d always suspected he felt the same about her.
Miriam hadn’t had a romantic relationship with anyone since her divorce from Isaac. Maybe because of her ongoing yearning for Sasha, combined with their travel schedule and performing lives, she’d hardly had any sex at all, just a toss or two a decade or so ago with her sweet, helpful neighbor, Moshe Gross, and a brief affair with, of all people, her daughter-in-law’s uncle, Ira Goldstein, whom she’d met and flirted with at her first grandson’s bris. He was a cultured, intelligent man, courtly and generous and lusty. Their affair might have lasted, but he lived in Berlin, and neither felt like relocating, and Miriam traveled so much already, they couldn’t figure out how to meet often enough to sustain their feelings for each other. So that was that, it all fizzled out, pffft. They’d lost touch long ago.
It was nice, daydreaming over her glass of tomato juice and vodka about her past sex life. It allowed her to forget that she was worried about this upcoming cruise for a number of reasons, Isaac’s recent intonation issues and her own arthritis among them, Jakov’s backstage tantrums over tempi, about which he and Sasha had never agreed, and Sasha’s emotional fragility since his wife had died abruptly last spring of an aneurysm, which had caused him to miss the occasional entrance, something he had never once done in all these years. But the main thing she was worried about was playing the Six-Day War Quartet, a long and difficult piece that Rivka Weiss herself had written, on commission, for the Sabra Quartet last year. They hadn’t had a chance to perform it yet; this would be their first time. Rivka of course was going to be on the cruise, with her billionaire husband, Larry, who was one of the owners of the ship. And Rivka had made it known to them that she was excited to hear her quartet performed. The problem was that they had hardly had any time to rehearse it yet, and worse, “The Weiss,” as they called it, ominously, was spiky, dissonant, and contained a full fifteen seconds of silence during the Andante. Miriam’s second-violin part was full of tricky double-stops that were nearly impossible to play in tune, as well as scampering, atonal arpeggios that demanded intense concentration.
The Last Cruise Page 2