The Last Cruise

by Kate Christensen

  Miriam was sure her part had been written with a certain punishing vindictiveness. Rivka had never liked her, for some reason that Miriam couldn’t understand. But the Weisses had funneled a generous amount of money in the Sabra’s direction over the years. The quartet depended exclusively on Larry’s goodwill for their most lucrative yearly gig, the summer concert series at the Jewish Folk Art Museum. Their fees from that series alone paid Miriam’s apartment dues and expenses for the entire year. And Larry was on the Queen Isabella, the very ship they were sailing on. So they had to play the Weiss on this cruise, and they had to play it well, despite the piece’s extreme difficulty. And they probably had to play it more than once, because after the first performance, Rivka would have notes for them, no doubt. She always had critiques, elaborate, poetic, demanding, and impossible to obey: “The opening fifteen bars of the scherzo have to be drawn out, slowly, slowly, slowly, like pulled taffy, like a sigh, like the slow fall of water into a bowl from a great height.” That had been written on the actual score. It reminded Miriam of the vague, pretentious notes Debussy used to add to his music, smacking of insecurity and control issues. “Which one is it like?” she had snorted to Isaac. “The taffy or the water? Or the sigh?”

  Miriam finished her drink and put her head back on her pillow and shut her eyes.

  “Three more hours,” said Isaac in the direction of Miriam’s ear. He hadn’t spoken in a very long time. He coughed to clear his throat. The sounds of his rattling phlegm caused her to snap her eyes open and make an annoyed clucking sound, which made Isaac huff. “I’m choking,” he said.

  “Choke quietly,” she said. “I’m trying to sleep.”

  As Isaac continued gently snorting with the remnants of his choking fit, Miriam gave up on sleep and turned around to look through the crack in the seats at Sasha, directly behind her. He was awake and staring straight ahead, his face blank, sagging, his eyes dull. Such a handsome face, it made her so sad to see him like that, collapsed in grief. She wished she could cheer him up.

  “It’s almost over,” she said. “We land in less than three hours.”

  He didn’t respond. Was he going deaf? That would be a catastrophe.

  She turned around again and opened her book, fretting.

  * * *

  *

  The plane landed with a heavy jolt. Isaac clenched his fists on his thighs. Miriam reached over and took his hand. “We made it,” she said. He squeezed her hand, and like that they were friends again.

  After clearing customs, the four of them walked a little stiffly out into the early evening sunshine, wheeling all their instruments and bags in various carts. While they waited on the curb for a cab big enough to fit them all, Miriam inhaled through her nose. The smell of this place was so familiar, so anciently known. She had been born and raised in Los Angeles, then schooled in New York City at Barnard and Juilliard, before she’d left Greenwich Village in the early ’60s as a young Zionist, all fired up with newfound political Jewish fervor, to make aliyah and live on a kibbutz. She’d lived in Israel ever since. Sometimes, though, she wished she could go back to Los Angeles, the city of her birth. But inertia, money, and the quartet had kept her in Tel Aviv. It was so easy to live there, with its beautiful climate and geriatric-Jew-friendly benefits. It was almost like living in Southern California, but better, because their water problem was figured out with desalination and recycling of gray water. And in Tel Aviv, she didn’t have to worry about earthquakes, landslides, fires, or tsunamis. The only thing she feared was the people, all the chauvinistic zealots and rioting hotheads. And given the choice, she preferred to live with the dangers she knew best, the ones she understood.

  Still, her earliest memories were here. And it felt good to be back, smelling the smells of her childhood. She wished she could stay a few days instead of driving straight to Long Beach and getting on a boat tomorrow.

  When they had stowed all their gear in the back of a minivan, with Jakov’s cello taking up half the back row of seats, they strapped in and the young Hispanic driver inched out into the thick LAX traffic.

  L.A.’s freeways were not so familiar to Miriam; she hadn’t had a driver’s license when she’d lived in Los Angeles, or even in New York. That had come later, in the 1960s, in her early twenties, when she’d learned to drive in a jeep in the Sinai Desert. But she remembered driving all over the city as a little girl in her parents’ Chevrolet, stuck in the bench backseat between her two older brothers, cigarette smoke blowing on the hot breeze from the front seat. Her parents were always chain-smoking. She remembered her father’s bald head gleaming with sweat where his yarmulke didn’t cover, her mother’s brassy, stiff wig curls staying in place no matter how windy it got. Her father had been a high school math teacher. Her mother had been a pianist, and a very good one, who’d given up any chance of a career for the usual reasons Orthodox women gave up the idea of a career in those days. But she’d taught piano lessons in their Boyle Heights apartment.

  All at once, Miriam was there again, in the old neighborhood. It came back in one whoosh of memory: their cool, sprawling second-story apartment in the Wyvernwood; dust motes swirling in the light near the projection booth when the movie started in the Brooklyn Theater; the Breed Street shul with its carved benches and painted murals and stained-glass windows; the B-line streetcar that rattled and jolted through the traffic and was so much fun to ride. She remembered hearing the Kol Nidre sung during the High Holy Days in her grandparents’ Wilshire Boulevard Synagogue with its beautiful domed, gold beehive ceiling, her stomach rumbling with hunger along with everyone else’s. She could hardly remember her bat mitzvah. She’d been so nervous. Daniel Fischel! He was there, and as she’d sung her haftorah portion, she’d looked up and met his eyes and almost forgotten her place.

  Her first kiss had been with Daniel at the Brooklyn Theater. They were both fourteen, so it had been 1956…What was the movie…? Something very dramatic, with what’s-her-name, that’s right, it was Giant. Miriam could remember the taste of the butter from the popcorn on Daniel’s mouth. His hot hands on her waist. Her first love. That romance had ended when her family moved to the San Fernando Valley in the late 1950s, when the freeways were built through the old neighborhood and the Jewish population became increasingly leftist and radicalized. Miriam’s last two years of high school in the Valley had been dull, no boyfriend, a lot of schoolwork and practicing her violin and hardly any fun, because she was so focused on straight A’s and escaping to New York to start her real life. She had left at seventeen on a full scholarship to Barnard. So that was all, that was Los Angeles, it was all Boyle Heights for her.

  And it was gone, all of it. Her parents and brothers were all dead. She had no family here anymore. When she’d gone back five years ago to visit her old neighborhood, she had found it so changed she didn’t recognize it. The Boyle Street shul had been abandoned and wrecked, graffitied, with pigeon feathers on the floor. The Brooklyn Theater, which had closed decades ago and been turned into retail stores, was razed, and now there was an empty lot there, unless they’d already built something else on top of it. And there were no more streetcars, not since the early ’60s.

  The minivan had been crawling along the 405, but the traffic cleared as if by magic and they picked up speed and whipped along. Isaac, Jakov, and Sasha all looked completely farmutschet, three old men who’d just flown around the world. Miriam imagined she looked as tired as they did. The Kol Nidre was going around in her head now, that most sacred of prayers. She was imagining the version recorded by Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot in 2012, so soulful, so moving for her to listen to, truly the embodiment of sacredness in music. Miriam thought Itzy and Yitzy (as she called them to herself) probably liked each other a lot, listening to the recording. You could always hear in the music how the musicians felt about one another. She knew that was true of the four of them.

  “Los Angeles
is so dirty,” said Isaac. He was sitting in the front, next to the driver. Miriam and Sasha sat in the forward passenger seats, and Jakov was in the back with his cello. “Such a dirty town. The air is brown, there’s trash everywhere.”

  “That’s not true,” said Miriam. “The air’s been cleaned up a lot. Where do you see trash? Show me.”

  “It’s not that I see it right now,” said Isaac, turning back to look at her. “I didn’t say I saw it right now. I’m making a general statement.”

  “The water’s not so good either,” said Sasha. “What’s left of it…”

  “Who cares?” said Jakov from the back seat. “We’re here for one night. Then it’s all ocean breezes and purified drinking water for two weeks. I read that cruise ships have the cleanest drinking water.”

  “Cruise ships,” said Isaac. “All you hear about cruises lately is people getting sick because of other people not washing their hands after they go to the bathroom. I’d rather stay on dry land any day. I’d rather perform in a department store.”

  “I like a cruise,” said Jakov. “The food is always good, and the audiences are usually too drunk to notice when you flub a note.”

  “I never flub a note,” said Isaac. He coughed with agitation.

  Sasha still wore the blank, sepulchral expression Miriam had noticed on the plane.

  “Sasha,” she said now, “what’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m dreading the Weiss,” he said.

  “Oh, I was dreading it the entire plane ride.”

  “I don’t think I can play it anymore.”

  “You can’t? I’m the one with the impossible part! Your part is all gliss and legato.”

  “Is that what you think my part is? Have you ever played it?”

  “The whole Weiss is unplayable,” said Jakov. “And unlistenable.”

  “I like it,” said Isaac. “It’s exciting.”

  “The Weiss is not exciting,” said Miriam. “It’s horrible.”

  “So what should we do?” said Sasha. “Are we really going to play this thing on the ship?”

  “If we don’t,” said Miriam, “Rivka will hate us, and Larry will never hire us again. But I’m okay with that if you are.”

  “Of course we’re playing it,” said Isaac. “And we’ll play it well. Stop being such babies. We’ll rehearse it for the first few days and then we’ll play it one night in the middle of the cruise sometime.”

  A dread-filled, resigned silence hung over the van. The cab came off the freeway and slid through the streets of Long Beach down toward the harbor. When they pulled up at their hotel, Miriam paid the driver with their business credit card and tipped him, squinting through her reading glasses at the damned machine. The display was hard to read when she was this tired. Yawning, holding their aching backs, they climbed from the minivan and stood blinking under the hotel’s porte cochere with their instruments and luggage. Swiftly, bellhops swooped in and collected everything, ushering them all into the lobby, toward the front desk.

  Their four rooms were on four different floors. It was one of the stipulations they made when they traveled, along with airplane seats in different rows. Their booking agent had screwed up this time with the plane seats, but at least he’d gotten the hotel right. Up in her stark, drab room on the ninth floor, Miriam ran a bath and undressed. Just as she was about to sink into the warm water, her room phone rang, that ugly electronic bleating all the phones had now. The little screen on the bathroom phone identified the caller as room 1216. She picked up the handset, looking at her naked reflection in the mirror in the bright lights. Never had she looked older or uglier in her entire life. And she prided herself on keeping her looks into old age, and her figure, too. She was slender and her face was still pretty firm, but her reflection looked a hundred years old, wizened. What did they make these hotel lights and mirrors out of? It made her want to jump out the window. No wonder hotel windows didn’t open.

  “Mimi,” said Isaac when she picked up, “can you come quick?” His voice was urgent, high. He spoke English.

  “Where?”

  “To my room. I need you to look at something.”

  “I’m about to get in the bath. I’m falling down with exhaustion. Can this wait until tomorrow? Or can you get Jakov to come look at it?”

  “I have something on my…my scrotum,” he said. “Jakov can’t look at it.”

  “For God’s sake. You men are so delicate. He has one too, you know. It’s no mystery to him. What’s on your scrotum that you need me to come and look at it right this minute?”

  “It looks like a cancer.”

  “Go to sleep, Isaac. It won’t kill you before morning.” She hung up the phone and stared at it. Then she called the front desk. “Please hold all my calls,” she told the person who answered. “Especially from room 1216.”

  She climbed into her bath and scrubbed herself well, ignoring all possible signs of skin cancer, although there were two or three suspicious-looking moles and an unhealed sore on her shoulder that she’d been a little worried about. She refused to be a hypochondriac like Isaac. She’d die of skin cancer first.

  chapter three

  Mick stood on the dock watching as forklifts unloaded pallets into the Queen Isabella’s delivery bay, to be picked up by other forklifts and cube-waltzed into her belly before being conveyed to the storage rooms below. He was still a little drunk, but he was an expert at working under the influence, any influence, for any length of time. He could work for thirty hours straight and put himself into a waking trance, drunk, stoned, or high, and never drop anything or miss a detail. His hands and his brain had struck an agreement: his brain did what it wanted, and his hands ran the show. That was how he survived this job.

  He shoved his hand into a box of asparagus on a waiting pallet. The stalks were damp. Any wetter and he’d have to reject them. He nodded at the forklift driver. It was almost five o’clock in the morning. The sky over the harbor was the color of eggplant. Inland, the horizon showed streaks of eggshell and cream. Everything looked like food to Mick; not edible, but in need of attention, quality control, prep. The air smelled like diesel exhaust. He felt as if he’d never be allowed to lie down and sleep again. His eyelids crackled with dry sand. His mouth was so parched he sucked his own tongue. Az Isten verje meg…he was thinking in Hungarian, he was so tired. He allowed himself to slump, standing with his eyes closed for five long, ticking seconds, a micro-nap, as his brain rebooted itself. Then he straightened up and got back to work.

  A pallet of broccoli came by. He thrust a hand into a random box and felt the springy green firmness of a flower. In four days, it would be limp and browning. But for now, it was perfect. Thank God. He hated sending broccoli back; he always needed every stalk. Broccoli was the cornerstone of the plating garnishes, a staple of the salad bar, a key player in the vegetable-of-the-day medleys. He had a good idea of the Isabella’s menu, but didn’t know yet precisely what it entailed. He’d find out soon enough. He had a meeting with the executive chef at 0730.

  Normally, the job of overseeing the deliveries was done by the storekeeper, but this cruise was small and just a one-off, so they hadn’t hired one. Mick was one of three executive sous-chefs, working directly under the executive chef in either the one main restaurant galley or the buffet galley, he didn’t know yet which. He was usually a station chef, a line cook; this was a promotion. He suspected it was only temporary, since he was filling in for someone else, but if he did a good job, it wouldn’t go unnoticed. Nothing ever did on a cruise ship. Anyway, it was nice to be outside, on land. He’d spend enough time in the belly of this ship in the next two weeks. He might as well get all the fresh air he could in the meantime. Not that this air was particularly fresh.

  He rummaged around and pulled an oyster out of a box marked WASHINGTON STATE. He fished a shucking knife out of his jacket and opened it, slurped
the sweet-briny nugget from its bed. He scowled at the forklift driver as if it were possibly bad and shucked another one, making the guy wait. The second was as energizing as the first. He nodded at the driver and the pallet moved on.

  That waitress last night, what had gotten into him? The look in her eye. She had run away and sent the other one over, the short dark one, and had stayed on the other side of the room. He was a drunk creep now. Fuck it. It had been too long since he’d touched a woman. He never got involved with anyone on a ship, not out of faithfulness to Suzanne, who had never been faithful to him, but because he didn’t have time or energy. Women on cruise-ship crews were young and luscious and decadent, for the most part. They drank and got stoned and slept around and had as much fun as they could, even though they were working the same long hard hours everyone else worked. He needed to fuck one of them soon. He needed Suzanne.

  His hand snaked into a box on the next pallet and encountered a neatly packed row of rotund things with rough prickly skin and hard spiky tops. They felt like tiny magueys grafted onto the tops of miniature barrel cacti. They were fresh, firm and full of turgor. He thought of aloe, with its thin green slime, good for kitchen burns. But this wasn’t a succulent. Then all at once his mouth was filled with the memory of a fruit: juicy, tart, sweet, fibrous. He felt a powerful craving for grilled chunks, with pork, soy sauce, something spicy. Pineapples. The cruise was going to Hawaii: of course. He waved the pallet on.

  The Isabella rose sleekly from the water, much smaller than the last ship he’d worked on. That had been a five-month stint on a vast white behemoth that accommodated four thousand passengers, most of them Americans who had opted for the package that included unlimited sodas from dispensers that read a chip in their ship-issued plastic cups. The ship itself mirrored the people on it, oversized, out of proportion, expelling ground-up food waste and treated sewage into the ocean, spewing colossal clouds of exhaust into the sea air, a giant pissing, shitting, farting beast. While the kitchens in its massive belly disgorged ton after ton of French fries, pizza, and grilled slabs of steak upward to be chewed and swallowed and deposited into smaller, individual massive bellies, belowdecks the foreign-born, mostly Third World crew worked long, hard days, slept little, ate little, gave themselves over to keeping this untenable system, the dream vacation, going.