The driver turned onto a bridge that crossed to the other side of the harbor, and immediately they were stuck in traffic, a glum morass of windshields and bumpers inching along toward the docks. Miriam’s mind drifted to tonight’s performance, during cocktail hour in the main dining room, as the ship steamed out to sea. They’d agreed on their lightest, most shamelessly crowd-pleasing program: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons followed by Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Miriam planned to wear her sleeveless purple sheath dress. It always made her feel glamorous. Playing those warhorses, she’d need to keep her morale up however she could. Maybe a vodka and tomato juice beforehand. But even this pleasant thought did little to blunt her dread of the cramped quarters, the crowds and claustrophobia, all the inconveniences of shipboard life. And the Weiss quartet: she couldn’t forget that for one minute.
* * *
*
Down in the galley, Mick inspected fifteen suckling pigs. They were coming along nicely; this was good, because they had to be carved and served at the sail-away party in three hours. They’d had to flash-brine them; normally they steeped overnight, but there hadn’t been time for that. They lay nestled like nursery-rhyme characters, tucked in their baking pans, bedecked with pineapple rings and shiny with glaze made of sea salt, Coca-Cola, pineapple juice, and liquid smoke to goose the flavors along. Looking at the innocent little bodies, their baby-piggy faces so trustingly soft, eyes closed as if they were only sleeping, he was reminded out of nowhere of a cannibalistic recipe he’d once read about, some tribe’s ritualistic slaughter of young female virgins who were then marinated in wild herbs and spring water for a few days, tenderized with pineapple and wrapped in banana leaves, and buried in fire pits to slow roast. He’d always thought that sounded delicious. If he had to eat human flesh, a juvenile female would be his first choice.
Western culture’s proscription against human flesh had always amused him. A culture that considered edible such stuff as brains, snails, fungi, frogs, fermented vegetable matter, eyes, and intestines seemed mildly hypocritical when they eschewed their own apparently tasty and undeniably plentiful kind. No doubt the primary reason the taboo against cannibalism existed was that human meat was so delicious. Otherwise, there would be no need for it. The Vietnamese loved duck embryos cooked in their own eggshells, which they downed with beer. In Sardinia, they ate sheep’s cheese in which flies had laid eggs and maggots had helped the innards of the cheese to rot. Cambodian fried tarantulas were a delicacy; Mick had never eaten them but imagined he would not like them very much. He had also never eaten Norwegian cheese made with a whole sheep’s head, an actual fermented, reeking head on a plate, presumably served with a knife and a loaf of bread; he had no desire to, either. He wasn’t a super-macho food sensationalist, he wasn’t addicted to that adrenaline high of showoff gross-out consumption for its own sake like a lot of the food guys on TV, but as a matter of course, out of curiosity, he’d eaten ants and grasshoppers in Mexico, worms in California, cockroach-like beetles somewhere else, he couldn’t remember, and blood sausage everywhere. Why were these considered edible and human flesh not? Meat was meat.
“Behind you, Chef,” said Consuelo, squeezing around him with a tray of something hot. She was in charge of running the buffet-galley meat station. These were her roasting piglets, in other words, and Mick was standing right in her way with his ruminations and woolgathering.
He moved away from the oven and back to the task at hand. At the moment, while keeping an eye on the so-far highly efficient progress of tonight’s ersatz luau, he was conducting an in-depth, largely mental inventory of his stores and their levels of freshness and perishability. The guy who was supposed to be here, a nonverbal Serbian meathead named Anto who was nonetheless one of the best executive preps in the business, liked to work off the cuff, improvising like a blind musician with whatever he had on hand. Normally on cruises, the stores were all arranged and earmarked and synced according to location, date, and so forth, programmed into computers and marched out with clockwork precision to fulfill the predetermined menu’s promises, but Anto was famous for his wild hairs of inspiration and flights of fancy involving many ingredients and a sudden attack of genius. The higher-ups tolerated this because he always, according to cruise-industry legend, pulled it off with panache. Passengers often requested repeats of dishes he’d thrown together. Some of them became menu staples.
But Anto had slipped and fallen hard on his ass a few days before, apparently (so Mick had been able to gather from one of the chefs who’d been working with him) while rushing somewhere with a heavy tray of an hors d’oeuvre he’d been in the process of inventing, involving chestnuts, bacon, habanero peppers, port wine, and goat cheese. He’d slipped a disc and that was that. He was out of commission for a long time, poor guy. Management had tapped Mick to take his place, largely, as far as Mick could tell, because he was available, his primary qualification. His first time in this higher-ranking job, as it happened, was going to be a two-week ordeal of seat-of-the-pants navigation without a chart or flight plan, with the likes of Consuelo as his first line of defense. He’d just have to pretend he was Anto and get the job done.
“Excuse me, Chef,” said Consuelo at his elbow. He found himself staring into a walk-in filled with seafood. He had been handling cool, firm mackerels one by one, as if he were still inspecting deliveries on the wharf before dawn. “I want to consult about the piggies.”
“Go ahead.”
“How can we get more flavor into them? I’m worried about the flash-brining.”
“The liquid smoke should do it.”
She handed him a skewer to taste. “Ham kebab,” she said.
He wrapped his molars around the back piece and slid the whole thing at once into his mouth. Fresh pineapple chunks interspersed with chunks of ham and drizzled with honey, then grilled. Salty, fruity, sweet, meaty—simple, but classic.
“Good,” he said. “Needs a splash of soy. Not too much, the meat is already salty.”
“Yes, Chef,” she said. “My team is working on pork belly sliders.”
“Something spicy on the sliders. What kind of bread?”
“No buns,” she said. “We’re breading and frying squares of pork belly, with pineapple and bacon in the middle, spicy mayo, toothpicks.”
“Okay,” he said.
She waited for an instant, as if she was expecting more of a reaction from him. Determined to bring her into line, he inclined his head to dismiss her. Immediately, she went back to her station.
The entertainment and cruise director, a tiny blond American with a silly name he instantly forgot, had been thrilled about the Hawaiian-themed launch-night buffet party. She’d passed Mick on to one of her staff, a young Korean American man named Park. “I love it,” he’d cried. “I will round up the tiki lamps!” Mick liked working with gay American entertainment staff, possibly because they liked working with him. He also, incidentally, liked being touched by American men, gay or straight. His job was lonely and hard and he didn’t have much physical contact with anyone, aside from bumping into people on the line accidentally. Entertainment people were demonstrative, theatrical, handsy. Mick knew that American men weren’t socially permitted to touch one another the way men in other cultures could as a matter of course. Straight American men were terrified of being perceived as gay. Gay American men were often careful to hide it on the job. But entertainment staff seemed looser, less worried about all that, though it was still an issue, Mick knew. So when they touched Mick, it felt extra tender, always slightly sexual with a whiff of nervousness, no matter what the toucher’s sexual orientation was. And the entertainment staff were separate from the hierarchy of the kitchen staff, although the two teams worked closely together, so Mick could relax around that crew without worrying about breaking protocol.
Park had a big, sweet face and a cuddly, bouncy personality. He was interchangeable with all the other A
merican entertainment staff, male or female, that Mick had known through the years. They seemed to breed them in the Midwest in particular. Park was from Illinois.
“Joliet,” he’d said with unforced cheer. “Forty miles in distance but really a million miles in all other ways from Chicago. A prison town, used-to-be steel town, and I’m very glad to be out of there.”
He’d asked Mick about growing up in Budapest, and then Mick had mentioned Suzanne, the fact that he should have been with her in Paris right now. Something in his tone must have given away how lovelorn he felt, because Park had stroked his arm and assured him that true love was never smooth, and he himself was heartbroken right now over a crewmember who’d just broken up with him, and he was here, on the Isabella, so Park would have to avoid him for the next two weeks.
This meeting cheered Mick up quite a bit.
He picked up another mackerel and looked it in the eye. He envisioned a whole school of them, grilled, arranged in scalloped stacks on a platter of seaweed salad, garnished with pickled lemon rind and charred caper berries, drizzled with spicy aioli. So he wasn’t in Paris with Suzanne, so what? He was going to let himself have some fun on this cruise.
chapter five
“You’re really here,” said Valerie as she and Christine hugged by the ramp leading up to the boarding deck of the Queen Isabella. “I can’t believe I got you to leave the farm and fly all the way across the country.”
“Are you kidding?” said Christine. “I need a vacation like you would not believe.”
“Should we get on this thing?” Valerie asked, squinting up at the towering ship. People jostled around them to board.
“I can’t wait,” said Christine.
Valerie laughed. “You have to have fun the entire time, in fact I command you to. Seriously. This is a work trip for me. I need you to be my proxy.”
As they joined the slow line of passengers spilling up the gangway onto the ship, Christine stole a gander at Valerie’s impeccably urbane outfit. She wore a gray shirtdress with a white collar and black wedge espadrilles. In her bony cleavage nestled a pendant, a brass owl with glowing red garnet eyes. She wore stylish black glasses. Her short dark auburn hair curled against her neck. She was severely thin, even more so than usual. Christine felt like a bumpkin next to her.
“It’s so intense,” Valerie was saying as she checked her phone for messages, updates, texts. Her voice was staccato, clipped. Christine had forgotten what New Yorkers could be like, coming at you like hungry highly-strung wild animals, scanning for prey, chattering away. “The pressure I’m under, it’s crazy. And then the whole fuckup with my flight, I barely slept, and the guy next to me farted these toxic methane clouds the whole fucking flight. Oh my God, I can’t wait to unpack and take my shoes off. Oh look, a text from Julian. Like I care. And another one from, oh shit, I forgot that whole thing, okay, it’s okay.” She mashed at her phone with her thumbs.
Christine had met Valerie twelve years before when they’d started together, freshly arrived in New York, as assistants at Babe, a hip women’s magazine with a young, feminist slant. The magazine had folded after three years, but their friendship had endured. Christine was always the stable, responsible Maine girl who supported Valerie, perennially lovelorn, through multiple emotional crises. She invited Val to sleep over when she was heartbroken, and gave her advice and generally acted as her big sister, or even mother, or even, she’d often thought without resentment, stand-in boyfriend. Christine generally had boyfriends, but she always included Valerie, who had become her roommate, in movie nights and takeout meals. And Valerie had always given Christine a lot in return. She was dashing and fearless and intrepid. She forced Christine to try new things, be more ambitious, and push harder for what she wanted. In the past seven years, ever since Christine had moved back to Maine and married Ed, Valerie had remained Christine’s connection to her old life in New York, kept her in touch with the world of journalism, given her all the latest gossip. She’d allowed Christine to feel that she hadn’t completely dropped off the map. And in return, Christine had remained Val’s sounding board and solid shoulder—from a distance, but still and always there.
“How is Julian?” Christine asked. She felt oddly shy with her old friend as they unpacked in their tiny cabin, cramming their dresses onto hangers in the doll-sized closet, stowing toiletries on the little shelves in the minuscule bathroom. She hadn’t seen Valerie since last June. She’d forgotten how focused she was, how ferociously professional. Christine felt a mild queasiness at the thought of spending two intimate, close-quartered weeks together. There was hardly room to walk around their luggage, which they’d piled on the floor. The two beds were separated only by a little nightstand. The decor was ’70s-sitcom drab: beige and powder-blue patterned bedspreads, a small round table by the window with one chair, a long low laminated bureau below a painting of the ocean at sunset in lurid neon oil. Christine would have felt cramped alone in this room. Sharing it with Valerie, she suspected it would be possible only to sleep and shower here. Even that would be tricky.
Valerie gave a hard snort of a laugh. “That is so over.”
“Why?” Christine asked, although she was secretly unsurprised. “I thought you liked him.”
“Do you want the short version or the long one?”
“Long, please,” said Christine. She was still feeling shaky from her weird experience at the aquarium, and Valerie’s serial tales of romantic failure were generally entertaining, if increasingly worrisome, since she seemed to be getting simultaneously lonelier and less practical in her choices of men, as far as Christine could tell from her e-mails. In truth, it pained Christine that Valerie’s dim view of men was so reliably and regularly confirmed by the accused themselves, as if she had an unerring instinct for finding the ones who conformed to her low expectations.
“Actually, it’s short no matter how I tell it,” said Valerie. She didn’t look at Christine. She was concentrating on arranging a dress on a hanger, and her voice was clipped, so Christine couldn’t gauge her feelings. “It was a disaster. The end. I need to conserve my energies. I’m not good at anything except work. And masturbation. No more men, Christine, I mean it.”
Valerie was right: she was very good at her work. At thirty-two, in addition to running her own successful news and culture website, called PaperCuts.com, she had recently published a New York Times Magazine cover story exposing “the shadowy world of hidden workers in the new global economy,” as the tagline summarized it. She’d been approached by a handful of interested editors in the weeks after it ran. She was in the process of signing a six-figure deal to expand her piece into a book.
“Your life couldn’t be going any better, it seems to me,” said Christine.
“On paper it couldn’t,” Valerie said. She closed the closet door, nudging it with her hip to make it stay shut. “Okay. You go up to the sail-away party and I’ll stay here and type my notes.”
“Notes?” said Christine. “What notes?”
“I talked to a crewmember while I waited for you on the dock. He told me about the system they have for sorting the luggage and delivering it to each cabin and suite.” While she talked, Valerie pulled out her laptop and set it up on the little desk by the balcony door.
“You already conducted an interview?”
Valerie’s tone softened. “With Orpheus. What a name. He’s Jamaican. He has a dreamy accent, they all do. No one on the crew is American, he also told me. They’re all foreign-born. And the ship itself is registered in Panama for tax purposes even though it’s American-owned.”
There was a knock on the door. Christine was closest, so she opened it. A young black man in a uniform stood in the doorway with a wheeled cart, which held a champagne bottle in a silver ice bucket, a small shiny gold box, and a cream-colored envelope. “For Miss Valerie Chapin,” he said, pronouncing her name with a lilting accent.
/> He wheeled the cart in and wedged it between the two beds.
“What the hell,” said Valerie, flinging herself across Christine’s bed and plucking up the card. “It’s from my new editor. ‘Dear Valerie, bon voyage, work well, best, Lisa.’ God, how thoughtful, I like her already. Although ‘best’ is not my favorite sign-off. So corporate. But whatever.”
The steward hovered. He was small and slender and very pretty, there was no other word for him. His short black hair was neatly parted on the side, but one tiny cheeky spit curl was pasted against his temple, and a diamond chip glittered in one nostril.
“My name is Trevor,” he said, addressing Valerie. “I’ll be your room steward for the voyage. Please inform me of all your needs and requirements, and I will do my utmost to fulfill them.”
Christine had been fumbling desperately in her pockets for a bill of some kind to tip him, knowing she had nothing.
“Trevor,” Valerie said, putting out a hand to stop Christine. “You get your tip at the end, right? That’s how it works?”
He gave one brief flutter of his long lashes, a butterfly’s flick of surprise. “Correct, ma’am,” he said.
“If you call me ‘ma’am’ one more time, you’re not getting a dime,” said Valerie. While she talked, she opened the small gold box on the cart and plucked out a truffle and handed it to Christine. “It’s ‘mademoiselle’ from now on. I love your accent. Where are you from?”
“Haiti, mam’selle,” said Trevor.
Christine caught a glint in Valerie’s eyes, the rapacious intentional charm of a wolf espying a lone Bambi in the woods. “Do you have a minute, Trevor? Can I ask you a few quick questions about your job for a book I’m writing? Sit here, it’ll only take two minutes, and then you get to be in a book.”
The Last Cruise Page 6