But this ship was a different animal entirely. He had learned from the brochure the office manager had handed him that the Queen Isabella had originated in a more elegant, scaled-down era, before cruise ships got put on steroids and turned into so-called “floating cities.” She’d been built in France in the early 1950s, renovated and refurbished in the 1970s, sold to Cabaret Cruises, an American company, and re-renovated and re-outfitted in 2002. She had just two raked funnels and only five decks from the waterline up, and carried a fraction of the thousands of passengers they crammed aboard those supersized monsters. Her lifeboats hung from davits, low down. Her curved stern swooped high over the water. Her bow rose at a sharp angle.
Mick had been told very little about this cruise, but he knew that it was the Isabella’s last before she was retired: a two-week cross-Pacific jaunt that would take them to three ports of call in the Hawaiian Islands followed by a reverse trip back. The tone was meant to echo and imitate her first cruise in 1957: retro menu, classic cocktails, cabaret singers, jazz bands, string quartets, old movies, blackjack and baccarat in the casino. Everyone would be expected to dress for dinner. There was no Internet service, and no one under sixteen was permitted on board.
All of this Mick approved of, not because he hated contemporary music, or kids, or the Internet, or informal clothes, but because he loved cooking the classic old dishes from vintage menus: oysters Rockefeller, lobster Newburg, clams casino, steak Diane. He liked aspic. He liked Hollandaise sauce and champagne sherbet and avocado halves stuffed with shrimp salad; he liked real cocktails, martinis and highballs. He romanticized that time of honestly fancy food and drink, back before farm-to-table became an elitist idea claimed by the rich instead of what the peasants ate, before the magic tricks of molecular gastronomy with its emulsions and foams, before “craft cocktails” in Mason jars made with infusions and smoke and fey garnishes. Growing up in Budapest at the end of the twentieth century had been something like having a 1950s American youth. It felt familiar to him, cozy and civilized.
So he didn’t dread this cruise as much as he’d dreaded the last one. Two weeks of making food he knew, and then he’d finally get to see where things stood with Suzanne.
His hand was shoved deep inside of a box of onions, looking for the dry-papery rasp that meant they were fresh. He sniffed his fingers. There was a trace of mold. That was bad, but the onions felt okay. He’d get someone to sort them and use up the moldering ones fast. Another wave of exhaustion penetrated to his bones. He waited for it to recede. It didn’t. He stumbled and caught the edge of a pallet to keep from falling. Automatically, his hand found the inside of a box. Wet, slimy, and jagged. He pulled his hand back: broken egg. There was never just one. He was too tired to care, and it smelled fresh enough on his hand. He waved it through. The albumen tightened around his fingers as it dried. He fished a sanitary wipe from a pocket and wiped his hand clean, then fished out and put on the latex gloves he should have been wearing all along. Another pallet: iceberg lettuce. Images of wedge salads with bacon and Roquefort dressing rose in his mind, antic, dancing, plates tilted and spinning. He squeezed a few heads. They had crunchy heft and enough watery give. Okay then, on they went. Then his hand was inspecting a T-bone steak, prodding, massaging, pinching gently. He sniffed his latex-covered fingers, inhaling the mineral tang of flesh and blood. The water shimmered with fresh, early sunlight. A pelican was strutting along the dock. Everything kept closing in on his eyes, zooming dark then expanding again. Sleep, his brain commanded. He needed a catnap before his meeting with the executive chef, whose name he hadn’t been told yet. Otherwise he’d be incoherent and crazed-looking on his first day of work.
After the last pallet went into the hold, he staggered behind it into the Queen Isabella and went along the wide central passageway. His quarters, he was sure, weren’t ready for him yet, so for now he’d have to improvise. Various crewmembers in uniform rushed by him, not registering his presence. He didn’t know the precise layout of this particular ship, but he could figure it out.
He climbed through the stairwell, up and up, then saw sunlight under the door marked EXIT, pushed it open, and found himself on an empty deck, of all the lucky breaks. It was lined with deck chairs. With any luck he could lapse into a restorative coma for fifteen minutes or so before anyone saw him. He walked swiftly to the end of the deck, ducked under a railing, and climbed into a private nook. He stretched out on a flat, cushioned deck chair, put one arm over his face to shield his eyes from the sun, and was almost instantly in a deep, animal sleep.
His dream was vivid and felt real. He was swimming underwater with a school of large fish who bumped up against him and blew bubbles in his direction but otherwise left him alone, as he did them. The water was bathtub warm. The sun shone high overhead, glinting on the surface above him, and he didn’t seem to need to breathe. That was it, the whole dream. It went on and on until a loud noise woke him up, a hollow metallic clang nearby.
His arm flew off his face and he sat up, wide awake, aware of where he was and why, being in the long-practiced habit of transiting from sleep to wakefulness in a split second. He replayed the noise in his mind as he scanned the deck: whatever it had been, the deck was still empty. He had slept a fairly long time, according to the position of the sun, which had thrown his balcony into shade as it rose. Maybe half an hour. Too long.
He leapt up off the deck chair and headed back to the door to the stairwell, hoping it hadn’t locked behind him. He’d been too tired to remember to prop it open. He checked his phone: 7:27. He was going to be a few minutes late to the first staff meeting, a serious offense. If the door was locked, he was fucked.
The door was unlocked: his second piece of luck of the day. He flung himself down the stairwell. His mouth was still dry, and his eyes burned. He wondered how his breath smelled and decided it was better not to think about it. His armpits, same thing. He burst through the lower door into what he hoped was the right corridor, and walked fast in the direction he hoped would take him to the meeting room. He ran his fingers through his hair and brushed his hands over his jacket to make sure it wasn’t askew. Equally crazed people rushed all around him. It was now 7:30 on the nose. He followed another guy in a chef’s jacket around a corner, up another flight of stairs, and down another corridor. The other guy pushed open some swinging doors and there they were, the galley crew, sitting in what looked like the breakfast buffet room around the longest table. Without the guy ahead of him, Mick never would have found this room. Now he was plausibly on time. He glanced at his savior’s face: very black, young, clean-shaven, with a close buzz cut. He’d thank him later. Maybe he’d find an ally. The guy wore a yellow neckerchief: chef de partie.
His neckerchief! The office manager had issued it to him just hours before, along with his checked pants and jacket and toque. Mick pulled it from his pocket and looked at it: it was black and silver, signifying his elevated status. He tied it around his neck as he slid into an empty chair between two kids in green neckerchiefs: low on the totem pole, one male, one female. They both gave him sidelong looks, ascertained his rank, and sat up straighter. For the first time, Mick fully grasped the fact that he was one of three sous-chefs who shared the second-in-command position here.
“Hello, everyone,” said the man who had to be the executive chef, because he was the only person in the room who didn’t have to wear a neckerchief. He didn’t look like much: slight and pale with a long, toothy face, freckled, bespectacled. “Welcome to the Queen Isabella.” His accent might have been South African, maybe New Zealand, Mick couldn’t tell. “I will assume we’re all here. Because you don’t want to be late, ever, for anything, or I will cut off your head.”
No one laughed. No one was expected to.
Some poor straggler came in then. No one but Mick dared to turn and look. It was a girl in an orange neckerchief, he saw: poor sacrificial lamb. The rest of the staff stared at their
leader, who pinned the latecomer with a laser stare.
“Well! And you are late because…?”
“I couldn’t find the room, Chef,” she said. “I got lost. I apologize and I promise I will never get lost again as long as I live.” She was cheeky, defiant, under a veneer of caution. Her accent was Spanish maybe, or Mexican or South American.
All the melodrama, the theater, the interpersonal power displays of the professional kitchen, Mick couldn’t stand any of it. He already hated this guy. She was one minute late, and this room had been hard to find. Why not let her come in and sit down quietly and get on with the fucking meeting?
“I will hold you to that promise,” said the executive chef. He stared at her for a couple of beats while she found a chair and sat down. “As I was saying. Hello, everyone. I’m Laurens van Buyten, as most of you know.”
Mick stared at him. That guy. Why hadn’t he realized? Why had no one mentioned it to him, the guy in the main office, the woman who’d given him his uniform and marching orders, anyone? Van Buyten was the most famous chef in the business. If cruise-ship chefdom had a movie star, this was the guy. He was Belgian, a hotshot, and he was young, Mick’s age. He’d come up through European fine-dining hotel kitchens and New York restaurants. Now he judged cooking shows and was rumored to be opening his own restaurant in Amsterdam. And he was maybe thirty-four.
Somehow Mick had managed never to land in Van Buyten’s kitchen before. He’d only heard about him from other chefs who’d suffered under him and lived to talk about it. He was one of those guys who watched you quietly while you dug yourself deeper into the weeds, just stood there seeming to grow bigger and bigger, swelling with power and swaying slightly like a king cobra, his tongue flicking in and out, while you burned yourself on a handle and fucked up the timing of a filet of expensive fish and dropped the ladle of sauce on your foot, then he struck like lightning and stopped your breathing with toxic venom and your eyes bugged out and you died. Or so the rumors went.
Of course now would be the first time Mick had to work directly under this sadist, these particular two weeks when he was wrung out and his brain was fried and he wasn’t even supposed to be on this ship. Of course.
Mick watched his new, temporary boss, trying to identify his tell or weakness—because everyone had one—in order to use it to keep him off-balance, to keep him from wielding too much power over him, since he already recognized him as someone who would do so any chance he got. Chef Laurens sat at the head of the table, leaning back in his chair with his left arm dangling behind him, holding a pencil in his right hand whose eraser he was using to trace circles on the tabletop in front of him while he looked waywardly through smeared glasses up at the ceiling, at the door, along the table, down at his hand holding the pencil, never directly at anyone. He spoke with a clipped, rushed cadence, as if he were carefully controlling a tumult in his head, parceling out a whole welter of stuff in pips and nuggets to keep the deluge dammed, controlled. So he was shy and emotionally chaotic. What chef wasn’t? Mick was too.
As he made eraser donuts on the tabletop, Laurens described in his flat voice the adventure they were about to embark upon together, re-creating the menus of a once-grand ship for its last cruise. This was clearly his attempt to inspire slavishness in the breasts of his peons for the duration of the voyage. He wanted to win them over before he scared the shit out of them, classic cult recruitment love-bombing. Looking around at the faces of the troops, Mick had to admit he was doing a pretty good job. These multiethnic kids, most of whom had likely never heard of half these dishes, actually looked eager to cook Welsh rarebit and consommé madrilène under the direction of this pale despot.
Laurens reached into a satchel by his feet and pulled out a fat, worn book. He held it up so everyone could see it.
“Mastering the Art of French Cooking. You all know it?”
The room erupted with nods.
“This is your bible,” he said. “Everything is in here. As you know, Julia Child was a stickler and her recipes are formidably labor-intensive. But this is our book for the next two weeks. Every staff dinner, we will say a prayer to the late great Julia. Now for the buffet.”
He consulted a paper at his right elbow.
“Miklos Szabo,” he said, pronouncing it perfectly. “Why don’t you tell us what you’ve got planned.”
Mick raised his hand. So he was on buffet. Good to know. Laurens fixed him in his sights as Mick cleared his throat. Every face in the room turned toward him, every set of eyes fixed on him.
“Call me Mick,” he said, unsmiling, playing the gruff but fundamentally good-hearted Eastern European bloke whose good side you wanted to be on because you didn’t want to see his bad side. He knew the theatrical power tropes of the professional kitchen as well as anyone. “Hello, Chef, everyone.”
He spotted a couple of kids who’d worked under him before, good kids who caused no trouble. He looked at everyone’s face for signs of incipient flaws, potential for insurrection. He saw only shiny eyes, neatly groomed heads, spotless uniforms, perky neckerchiefs, like a scout group, a fresh-faced crew for the old Isabella’s swan song.
“Chef Laurens has laid out the main dining room menu,” he went on. “So let’s talk about the buffet.” He lifted one side of his mouth in a half smile to stall for the second or two it took him to shake a plan loose from his gummed-up brain. For a bad split second, his mind went blank. Then he opened his mouth, and words came out. “Tonight we’re going to bring together two fun food trends from the era of this ship’s first cruise: Hawaiian and barbecue. Since this is a Hawaiian cruise, right?”
He took a breath, trying to decide how much of a lecture he should give them.
“When soldiers came home from the South Pacific,” he said, “postwar Americans discovered canned pineapple, their fencepost drug to Hawaiian cuisine.”
“Gateway,” muttered the girl who’d come in late.
He ignored her and went on, trying to sound knowledgeable, like a leader. “And barbecue had become very popular as well in the suburbs, not the slow-smoked kind, but Dad grilling meat over coals on the patio while Mom made cold salads like macaroni, Jell-O, and potato. This postwar America was a very nice place. We want our passengers to experience that. Now, times feel less safe, much less secure.”
He sensed a bit of restlessness.
“Tonight,” he said, and they snapped to attention again, “for our welcome buffet, we’re offering a suburban version of a Hawaiian cookout, like a luau, but with suckling pigs on spits instead of the whole pig cooked in a pit on a beach. Pineapple spareribs, fried rice, we’ll do shrimp kebabs and grilled mahi-mahi with a fruit slaw, fruit everywhere, in salads and centerpieces, flowers. And we’ll have ukulele music and tiki torches and dancers in grass skirts. Someone needs to coordinate with the entertainment director.”
While he talked, Mick felt himself returning from his exhausted walkabout in the nether regions of his psyche. His dream of swimming underwater with all those large fish had been about his job. It had been about fourteen- or sixteen-hour days belowdecks in the steamy kitchen bumping up against other cooks, not needing to surface or even breathe, not needing to leave his medium for any reason, because, he remembered now, this was where he felt most at home, his natural habitat. He was ready for this.
The meeting swept on. When it was over, and everyone had dispersed to work in the galleys, to find their quarters, to hammer out unfinished contractual business in the main office, Chef Laurens looked at Mick and summoned him over with a tip of his head.
“The person who was late,” he said. “Please deal with her appropriately. Make sure she knows that is unacceptable on my ship.”
“Yes, Chef,” said Mick.
“I don’t know you. You’re with Cabaret?”
“For the past eight years,” said Mick. “I just came off five months in the Caribbean and
the Bahamas on the Illusion.”
“Ah,” said Laurens. “That explains it. Well, this should be a cakewalk. Four hundred passengers and no tricks.” He sniffed. His freckled pale nose twitched slightly, but he didn’t sneeze. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. He was a gangly, weedy schoolboy, by all appearances. It worked to his advantage, so that when he struck, it would be as terrifying as a meek rabbit attacking viciously out of nowhere with a snake’s fangs.
There was nothing further. Mick was apparently dismissed. Okay, then.
He walked to the window of the buffet room, taking out his phone. There was a signal here. He dialed: it was early afternoon in Paris.
“Meek,” Suzanne said in a breathy exhalation. “Allô, chéri.” She was in bed with someone. The guy was right there, maybe even fucking her while she held the phone to her ear. And meanwhile, her caller ID had told her it was Mick, and she’d picked up the phone. “Just a second. Hang on.” He waited. What was she doing? he wondered. Getting out of bed, leaving the guy there to wait for her to come back when she finished with her call. Throwing her robe on over her naked body, tossing her hair back, lighting a cigarette, opening the casement windows and stepping with the phone onto her little balcony, out into the skin-tingling chill of a spring day in Paris.
The Last Cruise Page 4