“Okay, mam’selle,” said Trevor, perching with dainty obedience in the armchair.
Christine left Valerie with her subject and went out into the stuffy narrow hallway, which was as ugly as their cabin: blue-and-gold patterned carpet; embossed, swirled gold wallpaper; fan-shaped sconces with bright bulbs blazing in them. She skirted passengers going in and out of their staterooms, dodged stewards with carts, climbed some stairs, and finally burst out of the stairwell and inhaled the fresh air. As she climbed an outdoor flight of metal stairs, the ship’s horn let out a blast. The engines rumbled underfoot. The ship gave a lurch, and just like that, the Queen Isabella set off.
Christine joined a crowd of people standing at the railing. She watched as the Port of Long Beach fell back into a blue haze, saying an unsentimental but ritualistic-feeling goodbye to the pelicans, the oil rigs, the shipping-container cranes, the harbor, the aquarium, and the grand old Queen Mary, soaring so much higher than the Isabella; her black-capped funnels were among the last sights Christine saw before they were truly at sea.
On a small stage by the swimming pool, a jazz trio struck up a snappy rendition of “Take Five.” Uniformed waiters appeared with trays of retro snacks. As they went by, Christine scored a Ritz cracker spread with pimiento cream cheese, then a pig in a blanket, and then an oyster broiled in its shell, smothered in green sauce and breadcrumbs. Soon she’d make her way to the bar and order a very dry and icy martini with three fat olives on a toothpick, and later she’d meet Valerie at the restaurant for a fancy dinner, and she wouldn’t have to cook it herself or pay for it, and she could wear one of the dresses she’d brought, and high heels, and she’d put her hair up. She could indulge and not feel guilty. Ed wasn’t here to look askance at the wastefulness of it all, to wonder aloud what the point was. There was no point, really. And that was enough for Christine at the moment. As she looked around for the next tasty morsel, she remembered that eating was supposed to be the entire point of a cruise; the whole commercial venture was predicated on the simple equation of appetites and their satisfactions. Unable to muster any argument with this, she gave herself over to it, letting her perceptions and appetites coexist happily.
As the blue forms of land receded farther and farther into the distance, Christine wandered around the deck, picking more snacks off trays, until she found a small semiprivate nook on a balcony. She eased onto a wooden deck chair, leaned back, and gazed out at the open ocean, feeling like a character in an old movie. The Pacific was totally foreign to her. She was used to the Gulf of Maine’s heavy rocking chill, the steady winds constantly ruffling its blue-gray surface, water that never warmed up fully even on the hottest summer days, so when you plunged in, your skin burning from sunbathing, the shock of icy brine made you hold your breath and your skin tingle as if it had been mildly burned. This was a different ocean altogether, misty and amiable, a placid, pale green, gently rocking bath splashed by frank sunlight. Even the air smelled warm, with whiffs of blooming underwater algae that thrived in body-temperature shallows. She pictured the weather turning rough, hard winds sending high white-foamed waves cascading against the upper decks, the ship juddering and pitching, and shivered with happy imagined horror. The forecast for the next two weeks held nothing but sunshine and calm seas.
She picked up one of the cruise brochures lying on the side table next to an ashtray. The Isabella’s shape on the cover was reduced to a few lines: her bow was slender and high, pointed and aerodynamic, her stern curved like an Art Deco bar, half a flying saucer, out over the water. The ship had three cross-shaped masts interspersed with two funnels that slanted back like the much-larger Queen Mary’s. Her foredeck was clear, so her unencumbered nose cut through the water. The highest decks rose steeply from her middle, planted there like a building.
On the first page was a map of the ship. “C” and “B” decks were at the bottom, where most of the crew and staff worked and lived and where the stores and engine room were. Then came “A” deck with the restaurant, buffet, and galleys, and above that the main deck, then the sun, promenade, bridge, and pool decks above. The pool deck had a raised solarium at the stern, more suites and cabins in the middle with a catwalk on either side, and up front, a bar by the swimming pool. Christine resolved to spend the bulk of her waking hours there, drinking and reading and swimming and soaking up the sunlight. It was the least she could do, since Valerie had to work the entire time. She stretched and yawned.
On the next page she found a bullet-point list of facts about the Queen Isabella. The ship’s body was 674 feet long and 86 feet wide and 28,600 gross tons. Her record speed was 26 knots, and her cruising radius was 20,000 miles, whatever that meant. She had a passenger capacity of 976, although on this, her final voyage, the brochure said, the guest list had been cut down to 400 so that everyone could stay in upper-deck staterooms and suites, and to make “the cruising experience feel more intimate and exclusive.” Christine wondered uncharitably if this was because the lower passenger cabins were unfit for habitation, maybe beginning to mold and decay. Or else they just hadn’t been able to fill the ship with passengers.
She looked up from the brochure at the mild carpet of rippling water under the sky, two parallel planes through visible space of pure vanishing blue that appeared to meet at the soft gray horizon line that kept receding as the ship plowed on. Voices were amplified by the warm spray in the air, increasing in volume then fading out and replaced by others as people moved about the deck. To her relief, she heard no children’s shrieks or squeals or whines. The cutoff age, she had been told, was sixteen, but even teenagers seemed in short supply. There was one sullen-looking, slightly overweight college-aged girl in a blue sweatshirt sitting in a chair reading the same brochure, seemingly as engrossed as Christine in the Isabella’s facts and background. She looked up and met Christine’s eye and immediately looked away. She struck Christine as the kind of girl who would keep to herself for the duration of the voyage, watching the drunken, carefree adults around her with satirical sharpness, recording her observations in a journal. Christine had been the same way at that age.
The third and fourth pages of the brochure were taken up by a history of the Queen Isabella, written by Tye and James Blevins, whoever they were. Christine braced herself for the usual groan-worthy cheeseball prose of restaurant menus or cheap museum placards, but she was pleasantly surprised and even amused by the cheekily ironic, fairy tale–like tone.
“Once upon a time,” the story began, “in 1953, a ship named the Queen Isabella was born. This was a heady era, the golden age of capitalism and nuclear energy and a generally held, naively wide-eyed belief in human progress. In those days, it was considered romantic to smoke and glamorous to drink Coca-Cola and patriotic to support the automotive industry by driving cars that looked like bloated fish.”
Christine glanced up at the teenage girl. She was absorbed in her own brochure.
“The Isabella started out her life as the oldest of identical triplets: the (now-defunct) Queen Eleanor and the (oft-renamed, soon-to-be-scrapped) Queen Melisende. The three sisters had been commissioned five years earlier, in 1948, by Anne-Marie de Belloc, the reclusive, childless, and (filthy) rich widow of a French industrialist, and were built by Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde at Lormont near Bordeaux on the Gironde estuary. Unfortunately, due to some bad investments and even worse luck, the widow went broke, and by 1953, the year of the Queen Isabella’s completion, Mme de Belloc had sold her houses, her considerable stash of jewels, and other holdings to pay her debts. But, by dint of a sleight-of-hand false sale to her maid, she managed to keep her ships. The Isabella was put to work immediately, carrying paying passengers and plying the Mediterranean, to support not only Mme. de Belloc, but also her poor half-formed sisters, the Queens Melisende and Eleanor, stalled in a Marseille shipyard. They languished on the ways for the next two years and, when the former millionaire could no longer afford the rental of their
berths, were almost abandoned forever and sold for scrap. Then, at the proverbial eleventh hour, de Belloc, forty-three but still seaworthy herself, managed to wed an elderly Greek shipping magnate, Stavros Chronis, whose fortunes allowed the two sister ships to be completed, outfitted with teak-decked balconies, beveled chrome vitrines, crystal chandeliers, and soaking tubs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.”
Christine envisioned Anne-Marie with a blond scalloped bouffant, dove-breasted, hard-faced, but with vulnerable brown eyes. She’d married the rich Greek to save her ships, a marriage that Christine pictured as polite, chilly, and entirely public except when Stavros demanded that his wife fulfill her sexual duties.
“Each ship’s accommodations ranged from the two super-luxurious multiroom double-balconied owner’s and presidential suites, bulging from the sides with views both fore and aft, all the way down to the inner windowless bunk-bed cells for the crew. During the early 1960s, the Chronis Corporation sailed the now extremely popular sisters under the Greek flag on a leisurely circuit around the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, Valencia, Lisbon, Naples, Cannes, Thessaloníki, Barcelona, Beirut, Athens, and Genoa.”
The names evoked in Christine a sunstruck, piney fantasia of olives, retsina, grilled sardines, and hot late nights in seaside cafés.
“Even though the three sisters were virtually identical, equally beautiful and luxurious, the Isabella was always the favorite. Maybe because of her status as the first to be launched and sailed, maybe because of the fortuitous historical connotations of her name, Americans in particular (some of whom were at least passingly familiar with Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine but not, generally, with Queen Melisende of Jerusalem) preferred her. The rich and famous of the era booked her suites and dined on filet mignon and oysters Rockefeller at the captain’s table, danced the cha-cha and the tango to hot bands in the ballroom, drank martinis and cognac in the Starlight Lounge, smoked cheroots in the casino. Natalie Wood posed for a spread in Life magazine aboard the Isabella. Buzz Aldrin and his wife enjoyed a luxurious week in one of her first-class suites, as did President Nixon. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were caught necking by paparazzi near the swimming pool. Gene Kelly made a splash in the ballroom for a dazzling night, squiring several starstruck matrons around the teak parquet floor, dipping one so low her diamond brooch fell off, then famously dipping her again at the end of the dance so he could pick it up again and hand it back to her.”
Christine laughed aloud: it was all so improbable. And here she was, Christine Thorne from western Maine, spending two weeks on a ship whereon presidents, movie stars, and astronauts had vacationed.
“Just like all great beauties, the Isabella grew older and frailer. After her sisters died natural deaths, she was getting ready for her own retirement when Cabaret Cruises swooped in, adding this sentimental favorite to its fleet in 2002 and restoring her, almost completely, to her former glory. For fifteen years, refreshed and fully renovated, she sailed the Pacific Ocean from Long Beach, her adopted home, up to Alaska and down to Mexico and out to the Hawaiian Islands. And now, at last, after a long and fruitful life of dignity, health, and success, the Queen Isabella is making her final voyage. Her last cruise will be a celebration of the glorious era of glamour and elegance, a theater of nostalgia.”
Christine closed the brochure and leaned back in her chair. She had been aware for a while of a thrumming deep in the bowels of the ship, like a constant presence, a noise she could feel in her bones, the sub-aural hum of the engines. Simultaneously, she noticed the gentle fore-and-aft rocking of the ship as the bow plowed steadily through each rolling impulse of water, muscling through one broad swell after another. She felt safe, unaffected by the scale of the effort, like a flea perched on the back of a smoothly cantering horse. The relationship between ship and water didn’t affect her. She was too small, of a whole other scale. Her body reacted only to sun and air while the ship did all the work of moving. It was so relaxing, she found her eyes closing slightly, her muscles giving up their terrestrial battle against gravity. Her mouth went slack, and she felt herself beginning to drool and closed it. No wonder people went on cruises.
“Shut up,” someone shrieked nearby, a throaty male voice. “No way.”
“The pool is tiny,” came a snotty female voice from the other direction. “I can’t believe how small. It smells musty in our room, too.”
“We can get off in Honolulu if you hate it.”
Sleep, soft and muffling, folded itself around Christine’s brain.
* * *
*
The Sabra Quartet had spent most of the afternoon before the sail-away party in the ship’s chapel down on “A” deck, rehearsing, or rather desecrating, Rivka Weiss’s scherzo. This was a dampish, seldom-used closet containing a laminated wood lectern for a pulpit, four heavy wooden pews that could have been repurposed from a defunct Southern Baptist church’s fire sale, and a sort of graceless modern stained-glass chandelier, ecumenically incorporating a Star of David, a cross, and a star-and-crescent, dangling from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The room’s low-pile mustard-yellow carpet dampened all sound and deadened the air. The walls and ceiling were paneled with dark wood, and the back wall was heavily curtained in gold brocade, further hindering the acoustics. Imprisoned and isolated with their own difficult dissonance, they found themselves looking forward, all four of them, to later, when they’d play the breezy, boringly pretty, decades-memorized Four Seasons in the restaurant upstairs amid the genteel scents and sounds of fine dining. Ah, the freedom, such luxury.
For one thing, Sasha couldn’t seem to nail his diabolically tricky entrance in the seventeenth measure; but even before that, Miriam’s staccato arpeggios, meant to sound like machine-gun fire, bore a closer aural resemblance to chattering teeth. And Jakov’s long cello notes, which were intended to be human moans, sounded like kvetching. Only Isaac was able to navigate his part with any conviction, but Rivka had gone comparatively easy on the viola, whose part in the scherzo consisted of a lot of low-pitched blatting interspersed with high glissando screeches. Isaac’s part wasn’t even that hard to count. Miriam suspected Rivka of favoritism: she had always batted her eyes at Isaac.
The Six-Day War had been written in honor of the Sabra; for one, because they were one of Israel’s finest string quartets, but also because they were all veterans of the war. Playing it not only caused Miriam to break out in a psychic rash, it reminded her of being an IDF soldier fifty years before, the sun baking her head through her helmet as she barreled along in a jeep through the sand. Isaac had fought alongside Miriam in the Sinai; that was where they’d met. Sasha had been an Air Force pilot and was responsible for some particularly effective air strikes against Syria. Jakov had worked in Intelligence and had been on the team who’d intercepted the cable from Nasser to the president of Syria, urging him to accept a cease-fire. Why Rivka had thought any of them would be pleased to relive this experience musically was anyone’s guess.
“Let’s try this again,” said Miriam, glancing at Isaac, who looked over his fingerboard at his colleagues, acknowledging their distress with his hoary eyebrows knitted. “Sasha, what if we count you in this time?”
“I’ll get it right,” said Sasha crossly. “I can count it.”
“Hey,” came a bright, female American voice in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt, I had no idea anyone was in here.”
A small, dynamic woman burst into the chapel wearing yoga pants and a sports bra with high-heeled tango shoes. She waved at them all, amused by their puzzlement.
“Sorry, I’m Kimmi,” she said. “I’m the cruise director as well as the entertainment director, they doubled me up on duties for this cruise because it’s so small. You must be the string quartet from Israel. I came in to get a Bible. I’ll just grab one and get out of your hair.”
She strode to the lectern and looked behind it, into its shelf, talking steadily as she went, trying to mini
mize any awkwardness she’d caused.
“We’re planning a performance for the talent show later in the cruise, a few of us entertainment crewmembers. We wanted something ocean-related, and Park thought of the story of the parting of the Red Sea as maybe a jumping-off point, but none of us really remember the exact text and there’s no Internet so we can’t Google it.” She rummaged around. “Can there really be no Bible? What kind of a chapel is this?”
“We might be able to help you,” said Jakov. “We’re all familiar with the book of Exodus.”
“Moses held out his staff,” said Isaac, “and the Red Sea was parted by God.”
“The Israelites walked on dry land, pursued by the Egyptian army,” said Jakov. “Once the Israelites were safely through, the sea closed again, and the Egyptian army drowned.”
“That’s right,” said Isaac. “And there was a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.”
Miriam nodded. Here she’d just been playing staccato machine-gun fire that sonically re-created her own army’s successful war with the Egyptians, and now they were talking about the Egyptian army drowning while the Jews were saved in the Torah. There were similarities in the two scenarios, but no one had parted the Red Sea in 1967. The Jews had had to fight, with the element of surprise standing in for God’s miracle.
“Don’t forget the Song of the Sea,” she said.
“The Song of the Sea,” said Kimmi. “That’s what I came to look up! I need the words.”
“It’s long and I don’t know it all, but I can tell you Miriam’s Song, which she sings after the Israelites cross to safety,” said Miriam. “It’s much shorter, and it goes in English, ‘Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.’ Not really talent-show material, though.”
The Last Cruise Page 7