He should have been there; he should have been the one fucking her. This call was costing him a lot of money, and for what? It was torture.
Her voice came back to his ear then. “Allô?”
“I’m calling to say goodbye,” he said.
“So you are going. For how long?”
“Two weeks. I could be in Paris by May fifth.”
“May fifth,” she repeated. She hesitated.
It wasn’t enough. He loved her. He couldn’t take it anymore.
“Or maybe I won’t come,” he said. “I don’t know. I should go to Budapest and see my father.”
“No,” she said. “Come, we’ll figure it out.”
They always spoke English, although Mick’s French was passable. He was used to it; English was the lingua franca on the cruise ships too. He only ever spoke his native language with fellow Hungarian crew, when there were any, which was almost never.
Suzanne was a philosophy professor at the Sorbonne, of all the unlikely things. She was ten years older than Mick, quintessentially French, cerebral and unsentimental, highly sexual but not especially sensual. She loved to fuck, that was all. Mick looked tough and solidly practical, a hardworking Magyar, but he was a secret cornball romantic who swooned at beautiful music. He was smart enough, he’d read books, but he was no university professor. They were unsuited to each other in every way that he could see, and yet he adored her, heart and soul, and he thought she loved him back, in her way. They’d met in Bali five years before, and since then, he visited her every chance he got. Meanwhile, she slept with whomever she pleased and assured him it didn’t matter. He slept with no one and assured her it did. The thought of her with another man made him implode with jealousy, but there was nothing he could say: he lived at sea. She owed him nothing. They’d exchanged no assurances of fidelity, ever, and he told himself with stalwart, difficult fairness that he had no right to ask that of her.
Now he had to be away from her for two more weeks. That wasn’t so long, in the scheme of things. But as he pocketed his phone, he had a sad feeling that this was it, it was over, it had to be. He couldn’t subject himself to this constant heartache anymore. It wasn’t worth it, no matter how much he loved Suzanne.
It was getting late. He had just enough time to locate his quarters. Down in his assigned windowless closet-sized cabin belowdecks, his roommate’s bags were on the floor by the bunks, and the top bunk had been claimed by a toiletry bag and a jacket, but the guy wasn’t there, to Mick’s relief. In solitude, he stowed his things, took a quick shower, shaved his stubbled face, and then it was time to get to work.
The buffet galley was already going full tilt when he came in: kids were breaking down ingredients, prepping vegetables, roasting bones for stock, assembling the components of that night’s featured buffet entrées. One kid was stacking oysters in ice at a stainless steel worktable; the guy next to him pulled meat from steaming-hot lobsters. The galley already smelled like a flesh carnival, a stink of sweat and brine and steam and meat. Mick inhaled the familiar smell: he loved it.
He looked around for the girl with the orange neckerchief, the one who’d been late to the meeting. She was peeling mushrooms at her station.
“Your name?” he said as he approached her.
“Consuelo,” she answered. “Yes, I was late, Chef.”
Their eyes met, locked, and for an instant there was a flash of something in her eyes, an insolent familiarity, as if she thought she knew him and therefore didn’t fear him. Her orange neckerchief meant that she was only one rung below him. She had evidently read him closely while he’d spoken in the meeting, the way he’d been reading Laurens. He hadn’t forgotten her correction of “fencepost drug.” He wished he’d said that on purpose to find out whether anyone would be cheeky enough to speak up. Well, he had her number too: she was an arrogant little shit.
He kept his face still. “Once more and you’re gone,” he said.
“Yes, Chef,” she said. She was not at all apologetic, as if she were angry at the circumstances that had made her late instead of being sorry for being late or taking responsibility for her fuckup. Granted, it had only been a minute, and he’d been on her side, but this attitude was a bad sign. He waited, silent. “It won’t happen again,” she said.
chapter four
The Aquarium of the Pacific was exemplary: bright, modern, well organized. Christine paid the hefty entrance fee and wandered into the lobby, clutching a brochure, bedazzled by the soaring wall of fish swimming through plants and sunlight in the great hall. It was still early, and the place had just opened, but it was already overrun with screaming children in school groups or attached to parents.
Most of the exhibits were small, individually curated aquariums filled with bright patterned fish darting through lavishly weird neon coral, undulating jellyfish, and otherworldly plants. Next to each tank was a placard describing each species’ level of endangerment, its fragile ecosystem, the degree to which its particular habitat and population were currently being damaged by the greed and carelessness of humanity. It was like walking through a museum of ancient jewelry in bright boxes, Christine thought, everything there to be looked at and admired, but never to be worn again. From a distance, it looked as if the tanks were filled with glittery confetti, blown sideways with undulating streamers of algae in the gusts of current from the filters. But up close, the fish were bright scraps of pure life, lurid nuggets of color with faces whose expressions were as idiosyncratic and quizzical as Christine’s own.
She stood staring at one large, calm yellow-and-brown fish, its big eyes looking back at her. She wondered what the fish thought of its life imprisoned in a glass box, whether it longed for the open ocean, whether it had ever known the wilderness. She decided it had probably been born in the aquarium. Maybe it had no idea what it was missing, or, conversely, how lucky it was to be safe in here instead of exposed to predators and the elements out there.
Dodging two hip-high, screaming human boys who went barreling by her, Christine headed to the window of a large sunlit tank where seals and sea lions swam around and around, either in a catatonic state of bored desperation or a blissed-out transcendent trance, it was hard to tell. The boys had already pressed their faces against the glass as their father took shots of the seals swimming by, eyes closed, stomachs up, long and sleek. Their bewhiskered faces were beatifically cynical, like Renaissance paintings of saints’ heads. They appeared to be entirely unaware of the people on the other side of the glass, but Christine caught one peeking back at a little boy, who squealed with excitement.
“He winked at me,” he yelled to his mother, who was two feet away from him. “He winked at me! Mom!”
“That is so cool!” his mother shouted back at him, looking around as if to make sure everyone in the hall was hearing this conversation.
“He didn’t wink at me,” his brother shrieked at them both.
Christine walked down a dark corridor and out into the sunshine of the aquarium’s big courtyard, where there were more exhibits, colorful little tropical birds called lorikeets bustling around an enormous cage full of bamboo and trees, many kinds of sharks crammed together into a big shallow lagoon, and other, smaller tiled pools full of rays, like a sort of aquatic petting zoo. Children reached their hands in and tapped and rubbed the rays, who didn’t seem to mind.
She bought two small cups of sugar water at a little stand and went through the escape-proof doors into the lorikeet “forest,” a big, netted aviary with dozens of little birds, each colored in sections like a flower or ornamental jewel, bright blue, red-orange, and green, with red-orange eyes and a curved beak. Three lorikeets at once flew aggressively at her. One flapped into her hair and clawed at her head for purchase, another landed with a thud on her shoulder, and two more perched on her arm and wrist. They were heavier than they looked and felt like thrumming balls of energy and k
inetic life. She had to hold her arms out like a crucifix as more came at her, diving into the little paper cups and jostling with their beaks to gulp down the precious sugar water. As soon as the cups were empty, the pretty, voracious, powerful little lorikeets flew away as quickly as they had come, leaving scratch marks and droppings behind on her shoulders and arms.
Little fuckers, she thought, half laughing, half relieved to slip through the escape-proof doors at other end of the cage. As she washed her hands at the sink outside, she thought that these birds were like human kids: shitting, hyperactive, sugar-addicted monsters. She wandered over to the pool filled with circling, listless sharks, and made her way up a concrete ramp to a penguin habitat. She had always loved penguins, those most improbable of creatures, dignified, mournful, physically compelling, the Buster Keatons of the animal kingdom. Some of them were falling off the ledge into the water and arcing through the depths; others seemed to be involved in a formally intricate spring mating dance on the ledge. They looked happy enough in their artificial cage, with no predators, no stress, all the food they wanted. But as with all the other aquatic animals, the wall next to their exhibit held a placard about endangerment and extinction and global climate change, and how, in the wild, their species was threatened and struggling to survive.
Depressed, Christine left the penguins and walked on an upward, curving ramp past a shorebird sanctuary filled with egrets, ducks, and plover. Back inside the building, she found herself in a long dim hallway studded intermittently with more bright, glass-fronted boxes filled with doomed sea life receding into the darkness. It was the seafloor section of the aquarium. It looked almost like a haunted house, or a house of mirrors, with a dark, magical, unreal gloom, a relief after the starkly sunlit reminder of the planet’s impending doom.
She stopped to look at a replica of a tropical coral reef. The coral lagoon was filled with fish, wildly colored and patterned, with aptly cartoonish names like Clown Triggerfish and One Spot Rabbitfish and Humbug. They floated around the coral, wriggled through waving plants, looking peaceful and contented despite the fact that the coral was, on close inspection, fake. Christine remembered a scene from a nature show she’d seen on TV a few years before, a shark raid on a coral reef at night. Sharks zoomed out of the black depths like gangsters and attacked the sleeping fish, wrecking the coral and eating everything in sight, then swam away, leaving it all devastated. Yes, this coral was artificial, but at least these fish didn’t have to worry about being attacked. Things could be worse, she supposed.
Farther down the hallway, she caught sight of a placard that said GIANT OCTOPUS next to a tall, narrow tank. There didn’t seem to be anything in there but a couple of lobsters and some plants. She bent down and studied every crevice between the rocks and in the fake coral, but there was no sign of the octopus. Where was it? Had it escaped? Had it died? She went over to a young woman in a brown AQUARIUM OF THE PACIFIC T-shirt who stood behind a group of children thronging the petting tank full of creatures.
“I can’t find the octopus,” Christine said to her, startled to hear a note of actual panic in her own voice.
The young woman, whose nametag said LIZA, looked thoughtful in the professional, practiced way of someone who spent her paid days catering to people’s questions and befuddlement. “Oh, he’s in there all right,” she said. “He’s probably just hiding.”
“He’s not,” said Christine. “I looked everywhere for him. I think he got out.”
Liza left the children to do whatever they wanted and followed Christine back to the octopus tank.
“Octopuses are amazing at getting out of their tanks,” Liza said as they stood looking in together. “Another aquarium just lost one of theirs. It squeezed through a hole the size of a nickel and went through pipes connecting three different tanks and back into the ocean. They really travel, they’re very curious and smart. But so far, ours has stayed put.”
“It doesn’t look like a big enough tank for a giant octopus,” said Christine.
“Oh, he’s fine in there. Don’t worry! We all love him.”
“What is there for him to do in that tiny tank, all alone?” Christine felt a tightness in her chest. She couldn’t seem to draw a breath.
Liza gave her a sidelong look. “He probably crawled behind a rock. He’ll come out again, I’m sure! He always does, eventually.”
She went back to her post behind the petting zoo. Christine stayed in front of the tank, breathing shallowly, her pulse fluttering. She hadn’t had an actual panic attack in years, since her twenties in New York. But she couldn’t stop picturing the intelligent, solitary octopus searching its tank obsessively for a nickel-sized hole to slither through, yearning to compress its body and slide along a narrow pipe to freedom in the open ocean.
Christine forced herself to move away. With her head down, she walked quickly past the remaining exhibits, through the lobby, and straight out the door.
Back out in the warm, bright air, she sat on the nearest bench on the marina, with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths until she’d finally calmed down enough to walk back to her hotel. She looked forward to seeing Valerie, having a drink on board the ship. She couldn’t wait to sail away.
* * *
*
“How’s your cancer this afternoon, Isaac?” Miriam asked her ex-husband. They sat in a couple of armchairs, waiting for Sasha and Jakov to join them in the lobby so they could all take a taxi to the ship together. “Do you still want me to look?”
“In the light of morning I think I may have overreacted to a negligible discoloration,” he said. “I was exhausted from the flight and wasn’t being rational.”
She laughed. “That’s not like you at all.”
“It is exactly like me.”
Miriam caught sight of Rivka and Larry Weiss coming from the elevators, making their slow way through a crowd of people wearing nametags thronging the area by the check-in desk, a convention of some kind. She was surprised to see them; she had expected them to stay somewhere far fancier, more elite and sumptuous. For that matter, she also would have expected them to cruise on a private luxury boat rather than an aging, crowded commercial cruise ship; no doubt they owned at least one yacht. But she knew the Weisses prided themselves on living as normal a life as possible. They made a point of mentioning this whenever they could. And this cruise was a sentimental journey for them, commemorating the anniversary of their first meeting on board the Queen Isabella thirty-five years before.
“If it isn’t my favorite musicians,” came Larry Weiss’s penetrating voice.
“Hello,” said Rivka in her husky growl as Miriam and Isaac stood up to greet their benefactors. “Are you ready for the cruise?”
“We’re very excited,” said Isaac.
Miriam exchanged air kisses with Rivka and let Larry plant a smooch on her cheek. “Absolutely,” she said, looking with stiff politeness at them, feeling as if her face had been rubbed with ice. She was never sure how she felt about Larry. He was always breezily friendly in an impersonally general way that held an edge of condescension, but he wasn’t overtly horrible like his wife. “We’re all very excited.”
“You, I believe,” Rivka said to Isaac with a thin smile, “but I’m not so sure about your wife.” Rivka spoke affectedly, like certain artistes and poetesses Miriam had known, with grandiose dramatic gestures and exaggerated expressions. She also dressed like a poetess, in flowing tunics and tights and ballet slippers. She was bony if you disliked her, gamine if you were generous; the clothes suited her, and her manner could seem elegant and sophisticated if you looked at her in the right light, but Miriam couldn’t stand the woman, so she chose to view her solely as pretentious. Well, she was married to a billionaire; she could take it. But then of course she and Larry had met before all of this, back when they were both still struggling to make it, she in the competitive, male-dominated world of classical
music, he in the risky, fraught arena of speculative investment. So Rivka hadn’t married Larry for his money, and he hadn’t married her for her artistic success. They had evidently married for love, and then they’d both worked hard and been incredibly lucky in about equal parts. Even though Miriam couldn’t fault Rivka for being a gold digger, she could still hate her in the privacy of her own mind.
But she still had to placate Larry. “We really are,” Miriam said with disingenuous brightness. “In fact, we were just discussing today’s rehearsal of your quartet. We’re going to perform it for you on the cruise.”
“And I couldn’t be more excited to hear it played by the people for whom it was written.” Rivka’s slender white-gold bangles tinkled as she lifted both arms and dropped them again. “That in fact is the whole reason I insisted that you come on this cruise.”
Miriam knit her eyebrows together, thinking that “the whole reason I insisted that you come on this cruise” sounded like an ominously pointed threat.
Jakov and Sasha came over, followed by a bellhop with their instruments and luggage piled on a rolling cart.
“Hello, dear people!” said Sasha. He looked almost like himself again today, brighter and more alert. Miriam felt a flash of warmth at the sight of him, tinged with relief.
“Come,” said Rivka. “We have a minivan waiting outside to take you all to the ship.”
“Let’s go, you nudniks!” Miriam flapped her hands impatiently at her distinguished colleagues. She couldn’t help it, she was agitated and eager to escape.
Somehow, over the course of the next few minutes, she managed to disengage from the Weisses and hustle the three old men into the van and oversee the stowing of all their instruments and luggage and tip the two valets. She buckled herself in with a long, relieved sigh. One hurdle leapt over: getting out of the hotel. There were many more, of course: getting everyone aboard, then settled, then calm and focused enough to run through Rivka’s quartet at least once before tonight. They’d have to find a practice room. Life was nothing but a series of hurdles.
The Last Cruise Page 5